Quote Originally Posted by Cidel View Post
The commentary about the Manderville relics really goes to show just how out of touch the devs are with the playerbase due to their obsession with participation numbers and statistics rather than engagement. But we've known this. The writing has been on the wall since forever. I remember expansions ago Yoshi was like: "we notice a lot of participation in the FATEs that we constantly cram down our playerbases' throats for pretty much everything. Therefore, the playerbase loves FATEs and we are justified in reusing it in future content."





It's amazing. They add something new and put a bunch of different rewards behind it and call it a "success" when they see players at level cap (who are starved for content) run it for several weeks and see the initial influx of participation as the content being "successful and innovative." They are experts at creating their own self-fulfilling prophecies and using those as an excuse to not improve anything. The Manderville relic is no different, it seems. "We've noticed that this relic weapon that we basically give 1 away for free at patch release with these nearly-defunct tomestones that we drown players in just for functioning in any roulette or endgame content are seeing the highest numbers of 'participation' in, therefore it is a success and see no reason to change course." Like, you're damn well sure I'm going to spend 1,500 tomestones that I never use on anything else on a free near-max ilvl weapon, and when I cap out again in less than a week, I might as well get another, and so on. But don't act like that's not different from choosing to grind out a relic and just giving it away via osmosis.

There's some tone-deafness involved here too. I still remember during the Ivalice raids that the devs for whatever reason decided to remove "Need" on loot to the massive backlash of nearly the whole playerbase. They went ahead with it anyway because I guess it was too late to back out. Of course they reverted that idea less than a month afterwards, but the fact that they didn't even take feedback into account before implementing it speaks volumes to their hubris and general detachment from feedback.
Everything you said, from the devs stance on things, this is what is known as lying with statistics. They can pretend that things are a success by using participation as the data despite the fact that it's lacking in the fun fact or any other metric. Cooperations usually do this when they are trying to present data in a positive light usually for shareholders or other business partners.