Are we destroying "our own" game?

[Jojoya]

Different players like different things. There will always be someone that dislikes something - and sometimes that someone ends up being you.

Something can be the worst and still be good. It would take each person calling it the worst to clarify what their actual level of satisfaction/enjoyment is.

Personally I would sum it up as a decent expansion with some obvious flaws in MSQ. I don't like the apparent direction they seem to be going with the game's aesthetics/theme but I'm also willing to wait and see if it's temporary or more permanent.

But I am scared to even post this, cuz all the haters.

Don't be afraid to express your opinion.

I've got some dedicated haters here but it hasn't led to problems in the game or elsewhere.

[Astrus]

Here's the weird thing about MMOs and service games: listening to your vocal community can be as bad as not listening.
As with any title with a vast audience you're going to have conflicting opinions in the part of the community that actively leaves feedback. Then there's the unknown silent majority that doesn't give you any feedback until things get bad. A lot of companies are not really great at surveying the audience as a whole for feedback, instead opting to passively aggregate the feedback the vocal part, which is often a minority, leaves.
What you do with that feedback then, becomes a gamble. No matter what you do some part of the community is going to lose out, there's no pleasing everyone.

Do you ignore the vocal minority because your data suggests the majority likes things the way they are? This is a "safe" option and one often taken by developers convinced their vision trumps everything, everyone who doesn't like it wasn't the target audience. The downside here is when that vision had glaring flaws from the start that go unchecked for years and just keep piling up, the other big MMO on the market seems to have learned that lesson.

Do you listen to the vocal minority? This gives your vocal community what they think they want. The trouble here is it may not be what you as a developer want and it may not even be what the community wants. The vocal part of the community is often unclear on, or at odds with each other what, they want. The silent part of the community may become vocal pushing back against the change. The vocal part of your community that wanted something different is going to get more vocal. The people who wanted you to change something may come to realize that that change was not something they actually wanted. Who do you listen to now?

Do you have a vocal majority that gives you pretty consistent feedback about something? Listen. At this point things are bad. The building is on fire, falling over and sinking into a swamp.

So, in that sense, yes we are ruining "our" game. We always are, but what's the alternative here? Not giving them feedback and quietly leaving? Deciding on changes by majority vote? Just sucking it up and continue to spend money on a product you don't enjoy?

[Xaphire]

I think there's a huge concentration of doomers on the forums that don't represent very much of the community - which has always been the case for the forums. It's a small subset of the community and it's prone to becoming an echo chamber. I enjoyed the story overall (I can't comment on the EN dub, because I've always used JP voices). I'm on vacation wandering around following. watching, and supporting someone that wants to maintain and even improve an era of peace ushered in by her father.

I liked Zoraal Ja as a villain, and I even liked Sphene. I think a lot of people are put off by her not backing down or seeing any reason but we have to remember while she has Sphene's memories - she isn't that person. She never was. She was a representation with her memories that was designed to *always* try to preserve her people. It's all she was able to do.

As far as battle content goes, it's the best it's ever been. Dungeons were fun with engaging mechanics that can actually be punishing if you fail. Boss HP is set at a good spot where fights aren't long slogs. The normal raids were a blast with each floor having its own theme and the announcer is 11/10.

Only annoying thing (and this is just because I have to re-learn a skill that dulled over EW) is small boss circles again. Gotta get melee brain back into gear.

[fioravictorine]

I never ever came to the forums before this, I joined during ShB which I guess was FFXIV's peak so I was pretty happy with the game

But then Dawntrail came. It was so bad and Wuk Lamat is so obnoxious that I have to voice out my frustration and anger

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Here's the weird thing about MMOs and service games: listening to your vocal community can be as bad as not listening.
As with any title with a vast audience you're going to have conflicting opinions in the part of the community that actively leaves feedback. Then there's the unknown silent majority that doesn't give you any feedback until things get bad. A lot of companies are not really great at surveying the audience as a whole for feedback, instead opting to passively aggregate the feedback the vocal part, which is often a minority, leaves.
What you do with that feedback then, becomes a gamble. No matter what you do some part of the community is going to lose out, there's no pleasing everyone.

Do you ignore the vocal minority because your data suggests the majority likes things the way they are? This is a "safe" option and one often taken by developers convinced their vision trumps everything, everyone who doesn't like it wasn't the target audience. The downside here is when that vision had glaring flaws from the start that go unchecked for years and just keep piling up, the other big MMO on the market seems to have learned that lesson.

Do you listen to the vocal minority? This gives your vocal community what they think they want. The trouble here is it may not be what you as a developer want and it may not even be what the community wants. The vocal part of the community is often unclear on, or at odds with each other what, they want. The silent part of the community may become vocal pushing back against the change. The vocal part of your community that wanted something different is going to get more vocal. The people who wanted you to change something may come to realize that that change was not something they actually wanted. Who do you listen to now?

Do you have a vocal majority that gives you pretty consistent feedback about something? Listen. At this point things are bad. The building is on fire, falling over and sinking into a swamp.

So, in that sense, yes we are ruining "our" game. We always are, but what's the alternative here? Not giving them feedback and quietly leaving? Deciding on changes by majority vote? Just sucking it up and continue to spend money on a product you don't enjoy?

Welcome to why most modern game companies rely on cold, hard player statistics and data about player habits rather than actual feedback.
Doesn't matter if you have 100 John Does on your forums saying something in the game is bad when literally every point of data is screaming the exact opposite. Or more hilariously in the case of something like the recent Genshin Impact "boycott", claiming something is bad but continuing to engage with that system/thing over and over, thus telling the developers your opinion is irrelevant since you'll still interact with it anyway.

You can even see it in something like SMN, where if you'd believe the vocal minority the job is unplayable/ultra boring/the most unpopular job ever, but both FFlogs in EW and general job data they've shown showcasing its one of the most popular jobs in the game now post re-work.

I've said it before as someone with experience with more modern game development pipelines, the only feedback you can give that truly matters is to influence their statistics by either completely halting your interaction with any system you dislike, or to vote with your wallet and leave. Written feedback only matters to developers when it aligns with what they're seeing in the data side of things and they're looking for more refined details.

[Galvuu]

It's a small subset of the community and it's prone to becoming an echo chamber.

It is a small, deeply enfranchised subset of the playerbase, but I don't see much ground to the "echo chamber" accusations. The forums tend to trend negative because people are more likely to post negative feedback, but in most msq discussion topics, you can find people with multiple opinions, well, discussing their views. From the first page, take the topic on the nature Omicron/Endless as an example and go through it, there are multiple different takes being discussed back and forth with merit.
And while most people are negative on the msq, I've seen many topics pop up to defend DT, be it the msq or the expansion as a whole. You can repeat this exercise for many other things- like people saying DT battle content is too easy or too hard.
Ofc, people usually cluster on one side of these discussions per topic and, like I said, due to its very nature, the forums attract more negative feedback, but I definitely don't feel you can slap the "echo chamber" accusation when there's pushback in 4/5 topics within the first page of replies.

[PaleYonder]

I'm one more person that started posting here frequently because of Dawntrail.
I usually make a forums account for games I play longterm, to read community opinions (because that simply interests me), to contribute to bug troubleshooting ("This quest is bugged, what's wrong and how do we complete it anyway?"), and sometimes posting in absolute fluff topics, feelgood stuff, nothing of substance. When I'm content enough, I keep my serious discussions to private groups.
FF14 used to be the same, except the game's so much more functional than I'm used to from other games, there's not even a big need to communally troubleshoot. And I was happy with the game.

I liked the story, all through Endwalker, and any disagreements I had were so specific and niche they weren't forum material; it was simply personal taste and the kind where I could simply headcanon my WOL into making a different decision here and there, like I would in any linear RPG.
I liked the quest format well enough, and the few really aggravating things were either way in the past (pre-Titan excessive fetchquesting with no rhyme or reason) and/or got addressed by the community at a broad scale so I felt no need to chime in. (e.g. not a fan of stealth in games not made for stealth from the ground up, but that's hardly a revolutionary take.)
I was fine with the difficulty, too, for the most part. I spend too much time on the game and its outside sources and whatnot to call myself a casual, but even though there are phases in my life when I have more time than usual, I'm usually more of a weekend warrior and prefer the main stuff chill and manageable and the really challenging stuff unlockable voluntarily for if I'm in the mood. And I was rather content with how Endwalker handled that. So again no need to say anything.
Combat was fine, too. It's not the focus for me; there are other games whose combat styles I prefer, and FF14 doesn't have to be perfect about that. In this game, it's a side attraction to me.

Then along came Dawntrail, and since the main draw to me has always been the story, and I absolutely could not stand the story this time, it was something of a shock, and I had to talk about it somewhere. And remembering that in the past, the devs had explicitly wanted feedback, including negative, and had sharply turned the steering wheel around at large community discontent, I decided to post here, where it'd most likely be heard. And lo and behold, I wasn't alone or niche or crazy in my opinions, lots of others agreed, and others also started posting here (more or at all) because of it.

[Merrigan]

Yes, or at least in part. Although some of the criticisms are legitimate (my post is in no way a challenge to that), there is inevitably a snowball effect: the negativity of the forum influences our perception of the game. When you're part of a group of friends who are constantly criticising someone you know, you end up noticing flaws that you didn't notice at first - even if you don't necessarily agree with them. Same thing here.

No one is really above that.

Otherwise I enjoyed the msq. Not my favourite, but it did me good after the overly assertive shonen side of Endwalker. Content-wise it's very, very good and I hope the critics on this side won't be listened to, as selfish as that may sound. In fact, I think I'm having more trouble with the way my msq is wrapped up than anything else: too slow a pace, lots of pointless cinematics and too little combat.This is really THE negative point I have against this game: the fact that it tends more and more to turn into a visual novel, and I think this is even more marked with this expansion.

[Daralii]

If speaking to the same character is a quest objective 138 times in one patch, mistakes were made.

[Ruris]

Perhaps the construction of DT needs to be destroyed in order to rebuild and improve future content? Isn't that how feedback works?