Where does the mentioned feedback actually come from?

[Rekh]

They are going to take your feedback and then compare it to metrics and then decide from there. They aren't just going to listen to the feedback without doing any critical analysis.

Let's take Valence here for example. Valence posts nonstop about how homogenization is killing the game and everything is simpler and dumbed down and this is bad for REASONS. Some moderator or some other team member reads this feedback and the 100 other people on this forum who incessantly bring this up in every topic regardless of relevance and hands it off to yoshi p. Yoshi P reads the feedback and then goes hmm, maybe Valence is correct, I should check the numbers. So then Yoshi P would then go and check any number of metrics to see if this feedback is corroborated. Things such as:

1. Subscription count.
2. Players who cite homogenization and dumbing down in their cancellation survey.
3. Per Capita savage clears in each expansion.
4. Per Capita failed instances.
5. In the case of specific job changes like summoner, shifts in the number of players who main that job after major changes.
6. Average player damage floors across expansions. I.e. if the average hw mch only approached 40% of the theoretical best dps while the average EW mch might be at 50% (or potentially the inverse but let's be real here) then that would be a point of consideration.

And any number of other metrics that they could think of. Forum posters could post 10,000 anti-homogenization posts a day but if the sub numbers aren't dropping catastrophically with people pointing this out as the reason why they are leaving, or content clear rates are noticeably higher now than they were prior to all this homogenization and dumbing down, then they aren't going to de-homogenize things if those are the metrics they primarily care about.

The classic "the data tell us" out of touch businessman fallacy. Just like the data told them attracting teenagers with FFXIII, XV, and and now XVI would make them a healthy profit? We know the opposite is true. Sure, those 3 games "sold a lot," but "a lot" is relative to the cost of production as well as value depreciation of your product.

This kind of "let's filter FFXIV 1.0 complaints through businessman filter" is exactly how FFXIV 1.0 ended up being the product it ended up being.