Genuine Question for Frequent Negative Posters

[SophiaDL]

I mean, they are doing that. Just not at a pace certain players want. They've been gaining players and most players aren't hitting that wall as they aren't playing FF14 hardcore.

"they've been gaining players"

lmao

[Xaruko_Nexume]

Who are these white knight players anyway, that proclaim the game is 100% flawless and perfect in every way? I keep hearing about these posters who worship at the alter of Yoshi P and scream at anyone with the slightest criticism? Where are the posts? Who are these people? Im not saying there are zero people like this, im sure theres a post here and there somewhere but I dont think I have seen even the most devoted lovers of this game (and I love it a lot myself) come out and say the game was perfect in every way and was undeserving of any criticism ever and always?

Just because someone is overall positive about the game, or still generally loves it or god forbid, disagrees with "you" about something you dislike, doesn't make them white knight sycophants.

[Xeronia]

I mean, they are doing that. Just not at a pace certain players want. They've been gaining players and most players aren't hitting that wall as they aren't playing FF14 hardcore.

How have they been doing anything about those complaints? The lack of rewards wasn't changed in Mount Rokkan despite several bigger content creators citing the lack of rewards in Sil'dih Subterranean and no mention of it came up at fanfest at all about reward structure. There is no guarantee there is ever a change to that formula. I will give you they did say they wanted to go a new direction with how Deep Dungeons are approached but without any further details that is a very vague statement. After seeing what Endwalker delivered thus far there has been no statements Dawntrail will be any different in content and reward structure. To me that is an issue and thus here I am hoping somehow the feedback gets back to them that another expansion repeating Endwalker's flaws with content reward structure is concerning, especially given this is one that seems to be echoed by as I said prior larger content creators.

[LittleImp]

Who are these white knight players anyway, that proclaim the game is 100% flawless and perfect in every way? I keep hearing about these posters who worship at the alter of Yoshi P and scream at anyone with the slightest criticism? Where are the posts? Who are these people? Im not saying there are zero people like this, im sure theres a post here and there somewhere but I dont think I have seen even the most devoted lovers of this game (and I love it a lot myself) come out and say the game was perfect in every way and was undeserving of any criticism ever and always?

Just because someone is overall positive about the game, or still generally loves it or god forbid, disagrees with "you" about something you dislike, doesn't make them white knight sycophants.

It's about emotional attachment foremost. For what it's worth, there is a negative phenomenon of the same nature; They're usually called Antis.

White-knights are people who are emotionally reliant on the perception of a product being 'good' or 'successful', to the degree that their opinions about aspects of the product are more informed by that emotional attachment than they are by actual reason or experience. This leads to a strong willingness to be disingenuous, and frequently a kind of aggressive drive to suppress or otherwise shut down the products 'dectractors'. It's most noticeable when it comes to things like long running franchises, development companies or live-service games; This game happens to check all 3 of those boxes, which I believe may be partially responsible for the abundance of white-knight types (and antis) in its community.

Essentially, people get called white-knights when other people start to suspect that their opinions and arguments are overly informed by their emotional reliance on the games perceived success, as opposed to being genuine assessments formed by reason/experience. A pretty common example would be a white-knight defending the design of a system in the game that they have never actually played or interacted with, which happens a mind boggling amount on these boards.

Where a suspiciously negative poster is a troll, a suspiciously positive poster is a white knight (or a shill, but it's pretty irrational to think SE would pay to AstroTurf forums when they can't even be bothered to read them).

[Rolder50]

Note that half the topics in this forum are made by the same person with 2-3 alts that they change every month or so. There are genuinely a lot of negative posters because people mostly come to forums when they want to complain, but the alts are a significant contributor to this.

They want it to be better though and the point is to communicate it.

I have yet to see any actual proof of there being this hidden alt army. Just feels like baseless conspiracy nonsense. "Clearly this many people can't disagree with me! They must all the the same person!"

[Shurrikhan]

I have yet to see any actual proof of there being this hidden alt army. Just feels like baseless conspiracy nonsense. "Clearly this many people can't disagree with me! They must all the the same person!"

Aye, there is no hidden alt army -- just a couple posters who like putting up the posts that are occasionally considered incendiary enough to give them forum vacations and/or post too often for the daily limits, at which point they rotate to an alt account.

I've yet to see more than 2 of their accounts active at the same time, and there's no appearance of either inflating their like counts noticeably off their alt accounts alone.

Tbf, though, it's also not the only excuse used to dismiss any disagreement. "You're all DPS mains in disguise, working per some conspiracy" / "You're all actually elitists, with some oligarchical agenda," and "You're all just a vocal minority anyways" all worked fine even pre-Titanmen.

[Jojoya]

Seriously, I don't even know where people get the idea that 7.0 is going to fix or even partially fix the problems with this game, it's not just one or two people, it's like the majority of the playerbase.

If you don't like the game at all, unironically save yourself the money and quit now because at this point this game is irredeemable. There's literally no point in waiting for 7.0 to fix anything. Spoiler: they won't. Only reason to stick to this game is for secondary, non-game purposes.

It depends on what the individual player sees as problems.

A lot of players don't see any problems. Of course they're excited for Dawntrail, it's a new expansion.

Other players only see as the lack of a new exploration zone this expansion as a problem. YoshiP said the developers are working on ideas for a new exploration zone in Dawntrail. That solves the problem for those players (as long as one gets released).

Job design is a mystery at this point since they usually don't announce vague details until the JP FanFest and wait until the media tour to go more in depth. It feels like some players think it can't get worse and so whatever changes are made in Dawntrail will be an improvement.

What are the problems you see with the game that you feel won't be addressed in Dawntrail?

Keep in mind that the NA FanFest is what it has traditionally been - a big teaser. EU adds in some more teasers with a little bit of specific information (one of the two jobs will be announced, we'll probably get concept art for 2-3 dungeons, etc.). JP FanFest is when the big picture comes together.

A lot of companies have policies for devs not to directly interact with players. Nothing good comes of it in communities as toxic as this one. If I was a dev and saw how people act here I’d stay far away. When people are rude and entitled they aren’t owned the devs time.

Yet not everyone is rude and entitled.

I'm in the group of those who think the developers should be spending their time actually working on the game rather than spending their time reading/listening to player feedback and replying directly to them. But the developers aren't the only staff working for the game.

The Community Managers have traditionally been the link between players and developers in most games. Getting the occasional "we've been watching the feedback in this thread and passing it onto the developers. We've made a special note of X problem that was mentioned" even when they can't give us specific answers is helpful.

Silence only adds to player frustration. The more frustration experienced, the more likely one is to become hostile.

I'm not going to accuse the Community Team of not doing their job because I don't have access to their job descriptions. But it would be nice if SE had them engaging with community regarding feedback instead of just using them as a PR/marketing tool on social media and through the stream events, and writing Lodestone topics.

Knowing the feedback has been seen and forwarded would help.

(edit: to add in it would be nice they also posted translations of some of the JP publication interviews on Lodestone. It's rough when we're relying on other members of the player community to get information. It looks bad on the game.)

I don't really agree with the notion that all feedback needs to be constructive to be valuable. Sentiment is still pretty valuable on its own, and it's frequently going to be the role of the professional to contextualize customer sentiment, positive or negative.

Isn't that the sort of attitude that's causing problems in the service industries right now? "It's your job so suck it up and deal". Turns out human beings are tired of being told that.

More and more businesses are starting to realize that no, the customer doesn't always have to be right and especially not when they're being hostile to people simply trying to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Many are more likely to start cutting ties to those customers than serving them.

You don't need to use expletives and personal attacks to express sentiment. "I feel frustrated" is a lot more likely to garner a response than "You are garbage and should be fired".

If the lack of response to player feedback is starting to get bad on all sides, then definitely it's time that SE take a closer look at what they have the Community teams doing.

[Renathras]

Good thread, OP.

I think ultimately what matters is that people keep their criticisms to the game, not other players. When folks are attacking other players, that's not valid criticism of the game, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that folks see that and think the people doing it are kind of rage filled haters. (As can be seen even in this thread's first couple pages).

On the other hand, criticism of the game itself can be done by people that want to see the game improved (or at least improved from their perspective), which is honestly fine, though it must also allow people to argue the opposed position of they happen to like things as they are.

When the criticisms shift from the game to attacks on other players and other perspectives, I think that's when it becomes toxic. There's no benefit and the Devs can't improve the game based on "I think the only people that want X are people that AFK in Limsa all the time and don't even play the game" or similar.

[Lauront]

Isn't that the sort of attitude that's causing problems in the service industries right now? "It's your job so suck it up and deal". Turns out human beings are tired of being told that.

I think you're talking at cross purposes. In general in corporate settings it is rare the person working on a product will be the one dealing with customer feedback on it, unless we're talking about settings where the customer is directly providing input on the product's design, which will generally be B2B contexts or internal customers. And if you're involved in that kind of work, yes, you do need thick skin, not necessarily because of insults etc, but because your work will be directly criticised. However, for mass market products like this, you generally have specialised teams dedicated to handling customer feedback, so I'm not really sure how the picture you paint connects with such a setup.

You don't need to use expletives and personal attacks to express sentiment. "I feel frustrated" is a lot more likely to garner a response than "You are garbage and should be fired".

Yes but it's almost like you're picturing this as someone yelling at a barista or something for getting their coffee wrong.

The general expectation in dealing with consumer complaints is that the customer does not have the right to become abusive with the staff member dealing with them and that communication can be terminated at that point. But that's simply relevant to direct interpersonal contact and not the only way feedback is obtained. Also, rare is the business that would simply end a customer relationship altogether, just because the customer became emotional. Especially for a larger, more established business, it's not professional or good commercial practice.

Instead, a business seriously interested in improving its offering would try to understand what in the customer journey led to that frustration and how it can ameliorate it. Sometimes there may be legitimate reasons to the customer's frustration (habitually ignoring feedback/malicious compliance, for example...) and it's important to understand that to improve your product/service design.

Furthermore, if the business is harvesting feedback from third party sites, it cannot expect to have control over what is said and there is potentially valuable feedback being left on the table if it does not harness that. And especially on sites with anonymity and which don't regulate what can or can't be said, you're going to have the occasional "X should be fired", expletives etc.

All LittleImp seems to be saying to me is that the feedback does not need to be able to precisely pinpoint how the product could be improved to be valuable... and I 100% agree with this:

The notion of a developer in a corporate setting ignoring feedback because it hurts their feelings is legitimately beyond absurd.

Hiding behind a few nasty comments here and there and using it as a pretext to ignore feedback is neither wise nor a respectable practice, IMO.

What the devs can control is their own website and it certainly would be nice if we saw more of an effort on SE's part there, but it's not the only way they could ask their customers for their thoughts.

[Mcg55ss]

If you mean the WoW sub then that subreddit is literally filled with more FF14 players than WoW players and players that havent played WoW in 10 years but still decide to have an opinion on it. They pretty much overran the subreddit around 2 years ago and the mods didnt care.

But aside from that, what even is your point?

I believe i said WOW FORUMS...if i meant subreddit i would have said subreddit, just cuz you want to make on mindset negatively on this game don't think im too dumb to know what im talking about or mean.