How I feel about Yoshida's Vagueness

[strawberrycake]

This sums it up. This is exactly WHAT I mean about Yoshida being Vague. We need more substantial responses and less of the Vague PR speak. But as soon as this doesn't pan out, people who feel slighted will be silenced again and told to Quit, leave, play another game, while Yoshida and CBU3 was just trampling over players trust.

I don't understand why people don't see him doing that as an issue. Or is it because they're not the ones who are being slighted that they're fine, for now.

And I think the best way to deal with how people reacted in the past, is to wait until all the systemsthat will be in the expansion are in place and in an alpha build, and sit down and show these systems, then ask for player feed back on them. SO people who don't like them can leave early, people can't rag(people will always rag on him let's be real) then it's a more involved process with how the game gets made with more direct player involvement.

Because if they get all the confirmed features, put them in an alpha to show us, they can THEN make a thread, ON THESE FORUMS, And said thread can have a very solid description OF their current plans are susceptible to change and we can given structured feed back that isn;t rude or mean spirited. And bam, player driven content and the direct feed back he wants. Not everything will perfect but you save your own rear and make players happy.

[CidHeiral]

I don't understand why people don't see him doing that as an issue.

I don't understand why people make new threads to pander for attention instead of posting in the existing thread on the topic.

[strawberrycake]

I don't understand why people make new threads to pander for attention instead of posting in the existing thread on the topic.

Take that up with the none existent Community Managers^^

[Thurmnmurmn]

I'd much rather having vague answers over a more concrete answer that may end up not being true.
If it's not 100% confirmed, yes keep it vague.

[Bun_Vivant]

There are three honest options available to Yoshida-san when answering a question about the future:
1) a detailed answer according to what he currently believes, which leaves him open to attack if it turns out not to be true
2) a vague answer
3) no answer -- which seems a common norm in industry

It's easy to understand why anyone would be reticent to go with option 1.
So which would people prefer of the remaining two options?

[Rehayem]

There's a reason you never believe nor defend a multi-billion dollar company. They don't care about you, they want your profits, that's what PR talks is about, otherwise their shareholders would just dip instantly.

[CidHeiral]

Take that up with the none existent Community Managers^^

You're not in control of your own behavior?

[LilimoLimomo]

If I'm doing PR for my subscription-based product that I want to thrive for the next decade, the last thing I want my users to do is expect results that we are not going to deliver, because that leads to disappointment and resentment, which leads to user attrition. Which is to say, it's incredibly unlikely that Yoshida is intentionally engaging in a strategy that would predictably have negative results. And in fact, I can think of numerous times when Yoshida has gone out of his way to temper player expectations.

The more realistic explanation for Yoshida being vague is that he doesn't have anything more substantial that he's willing to commit to; he's simply giving you a peek into what he's thinking and what his goals are. And that's both reasonable and prudent, because even if he has a specific idea in mind for exactly how battle systems or whatever should be changed, it's almost certain that the iterative process of game development will result in the end product in some way deviating from his initial vision. And because of that it's better to not provide those details, because you don't want to tell your audience to expect something that you might not deliver.

Some users will certainly take anything Yoshi-P says and project their wildest hopes and dreams onto it, and that's unfortunate. I mean, it's absolutely wild seeing some of the things that players are expecting now that Yoshi-P made a vague off-hand comment about wanting the game to have more challenge. For the players who are having fun guessing and speculating on what this might mean, I think that's great. But the folks who are actually forming expectations from these statements are putting the cart before the horse and setting themselves up for disappointment.

I guess Yoshi-P could try to put a damper on that by never talking about more abstract topics such as his design thoughts, but I don't think the benefit is worth the loss there. I like being able to hear what he's thinking about development, the game, the community, etc. It's nice to have there be a bit of a bridge between the devs and the community, and I would hate for everyone to lose that.

I feel like the takeaway from all this is fairly reasonable and actionable: as users, we need to stay grounded and not expect what hasn't explicitly been promised to us. And if we find that we keep projecting things onto what others are saying, hopefully we can recognize that it's the "projecting" part that's the problem, and we can do our best to build better personal habits to mitigate that.

[Canadane]

People still want roaming primals, FC alliances, and a different system for personal housing.
Every time he says something with definitive wording but that thing is so far down the pipeline it ends up not happening, people throw a fit.
He can't say anything at all because people take it as gospel. He'll only ever comment on something that might appear in the very next patch only because anything further out than one or two patches is still too "up in the air" for it to for sure happen.

[Jeeqbit]

Usually when Yoshi-P says something it does materialize as something, because he knows that anything he says can get taken as an announcement.

Often, I find these interviews foreshadow changes in his personal thought process that get reflected later on. Take job changes for example. He talked regularly about the importance of job uniqueness, then suddenly he just stopped mentioning that at all. He was asked what jobs he thought were good for a new player, and he listed the ones he thought were easier to play and the ones that were for players that wanted a challenge. As he listed them, it seemed like he was almost coming to a realization that some jobs being easy to play and some of them being hard was a problem, and shortly thereafter we started to see the difficulty of them get brought closer together.

But because of how vague this particular one is, I wouldn't go expecting anything. Even if the difficulty changes in some form, it's unlikely it's gonna make everyone on this forum happy.