Communication around job design and changes

[Jeeqbit]

If they actually talked to players beforehand and tried to accomodate that feedback, they’d get a hell of a lot less complaints I’d say

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

1. Post regularly on the forums, and get inundated with polarized views and well-thought out replies being drowned out by ones that are not. Almost leaving them back at square one.
2. Do a conference system where only one person is allowed to speak at a time, like a TED talk or discord's stage calls. I suppose this could be like the Q&As they have done before, but allow them more time to put their point across.
3. Do a livestream and read the chat like they've done occasionally in live letters.
4. Ask people to post on the forums anyway but not reply because it'd get drowned out by all the polarized discussion, then aggregate the feedback.
5. Meet people in person instead which forces people to choose their words and thoughts more carefully, like they have been doing recently with fanfests, gamescom, pax, etc.

It's easy to just say "talk to us". But if you think about it they kinda have done many of the options. It's perhaps just doing it more ie. interacting with twitch/youtube chat more during liveletters to have thorough discussions/debates, aggregating feedback better from the forums, regular reddit AMAs.

But even if they did all of this more, would it change much? If all they get from that is polarized views, they will be in the same situation: unsure which direction to go because people are split and there are different parts of the community to cater to.

[ovIm]

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

I mean, this here was a good way to talk to us.

For the first time in FFXIV, upcoming job adjustments were talked about in a blog post. And players had a chance to give feedback to what was planned. This was a good thing, overall, and interestingly enough, most feedback I have read on the forum was more constructive.

The method is good - announce something like that, have the forums discuss it, and have community managers aggregate player feedback to forward to the dev team.

In terms of Viper, there was no criticism about the job design as it was, it was mostly praise that Square Enix build the job well, and to not change it. Yoshi-P even acknowledges this. Its frustrating when the devs open a dialogue like that, only to ignore our feedback.

Alternatively, SqEx could also just... make ingame polls, and ask for players opinions there.

[Supersnow845]

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

1. Post regularly on the forums, and get inundated with polarized views and well-thought out replies being drowned out by ones that are not. Almost leaving them back at square one.
2. Do a conference system where only one person is allowed to speak at a time, like a TED talk or discord's stage calls. I suppose this could be like the Q&As they have done before, but allow them more time to put their point across.
3. Do a livestream and read the chat like they've done occasionally in live letters.
4. Ask people to post on the forums anyway but not reply because it'd get drowned out by all the polarized discussion, then aggregate the feedback.
5. Meet people in person instead which forces people to choose their words and thoughts more carefully, like they have been doing recently with fanfests, gamescom, pax, etc.

It's easy to just say "talk to us". But if you think about it they kinda have done many of the options. It's perhaps just doing it more ie. interacting with twitch/youtube chat more during liveletters to have thorough discussions/debates, aggregating feedback better from the forums, regular reddit AMAs.

But even if they did all of this more, would it change much? If all they get from that is polarized views, they will be in the same situation: unsure which direction to go because people are split and there are different parts of the community to cater to.

Almost every other MMO has some kind of proper feedback loop that isn’t built on randomly flailing about in the dark on the forums and hoping that something comes out of it

For example a semi regular thing that gets used is community polls

Let’s take VPR changes

Option 1) remove noxious
Option 2) remove or reduce positionals
Option 3) slow the job down
Option 4) do nothing

People vote on that then that gives the devs a good lead into it, don’t let us pick what you are going to do, pick a narrow set of possible fixes to a problem you have identified and allow us to vote on our preferred action. You could even weight polls by a pre-selected “main” that each person picks

Direct communication on the current forum system won’t go very far but that’s specifically because they’ve allowed the forums to collapse into a cesspit where everyone is just screaming hoping to be the one random person they apparently pull the feedback from when they make a change