JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[Striker44]

Ok, then please provide us the official numbers, or another proper source aside from steam.

I'll be waiting.

Yall keep talking about how steam is a bad source of statistics, but provide absolutely nothing else, it's actually hilarious, so far the only attempt at proving steam wrong is "read youtube comments lmao" which is literally not a source for statistics.

So, your approach is to simply ignore any data that doesn't suit your agenda, including the very Steam data that was just analyzed and showing the game as doing extremely well? Nice.

[Shurrikhan]

Players have been critical of Yoshi P since ARR. Every time there is something the community views negatively they come together and criticize him. Time passes, they either forget their woes or get drowned out amongst other, newer issues that come up and time keeps moving forward. Genuinely don't see this being any different.

Since 1.18, actually, and often for the same reasons he's been criticized since. Namely, that he can function decently in a reactive fashion, provided the solutions are low-hanging and broadly obvious enough, but tends not to be able to communicate any proactive vision for the game that isn't just maintaining whatever commonplace or scavenged components that met the minimum requirements for earlier reactions.

Consider his first big improvements to the game:
1. There's no auto-attack. *Display of shock, horror, and abject disgust.* → We'll remove choice of basic attacks and their APM, replacing that with idle time so that you can have your auto-attacks.

2. There's no blatantly obvious appearance of FF staple jobs! → Okay, we'll remove the whole originally intended system of being able to learn any martial and magical art and build your own job from them by removing all meaningful stat and ability customization and rendering the classes from which you could build your own job into stepping stones rendered obsolete upon reaching level 30.

3. There's too wide a variety of abilities and I'm not sure what skills I should ideally have equipped! Also, the TP efficiencies for these various skills doesn't seem the most balanced... → Okay, now all jobs have 2 combos that they alternate. That's it. AoEs will just be flat damage per target, with no more confusing shapes or additional effects. And if you spend TP on the combo opener, the rest of the combo is free, so there's no longer any reason to use anything out of order or to manage TP.

4. Battle Regimen still doesn't seem well implemented... → No worries; we've removed it.

[SDaemon]

Since 1.18, actually, and often for the same reasons he's been criticized since. Namely, that he can function decently in a reactive fashion, provided the solutions are low-hanging and broadly obvious enough, but tends not to be able to communicate any proactive vision for the game that isn't just maintaining whatever hackneyed or scavenged components that met the minimum requirements for earlier reactions.

Consider his first big improvements to the game:
1. There's no auto-attack. *Display of shock, horror, and abject disgust.* → We'll remove choice of basic attacks and their APM, replacing that with idle time so that you can have your auto-attacks.

2. There's no blatantly obvious appearance of FF staple jobs! → Okay, we'll remove the whole originally intended system of being able to learn any martial and magical art and build your own job from them by removing all meaningful stat and ability customization and rendering the classes from which you could build your own job into stepping stones rendered obsolete upon reaching level 30.

3. There's too wide a variety of abilities and I'm not sure what skills I should ideally have equipped! Also, the TP efficiencies for these various skills doesn't seem the most balanced... → Okay, now all jobs have 2 combos that they alternate. That's it. AoEs will just be flat damage per target, with no more confusing shapes or additional effects. And if you spend TP on the combo opener, the rest of the combo is free, so there's no longer any reason to use anything out of order or to manage TP.

4. Battle Regimen still doesn't seem well implemented...!→ No worries; we've removed it.

Thanks for enforcing my point. People will continue to support him, people will continue to criticize him and ultimately the cycle continues.

[Shurrikhan]

Thanks for enforcing my point. People will continue to support him, people will continue to criticize him and ultimately the cycle continues.

I'm not sure why "here are the good parts; here are the bad" should lead to a conclusion the likes of "the playerbase will simply forever be split into unreconcileable camps regarding him and so there's no useful discourse to be had on the matter."

There is useful discourse to be had on the matter. There will likely to continue to be little ambition at a system or content level, let alone in any cohesive fashion, under his leadership if it continues as it has been, while replacing him would likely open us up to a number of issues in at least the short-term, especially for players who like the consistency of XIV's long-time content formula(s). But that needn't be where discourse stops. Every change we've gotten that Yoshida previously commented on (usually to call it technically impossible) has been achieved despite him; while the barrier to change might in many cases be higher than with another director, it can happen, and once parts of a given path gets normalized and appears sufficiently safe, it has a decent-ish chance, at least, of being taken further. Which, honestly, may be increasingly necessary.

[Talamh]

The issue isn't Yoshi P.
The issue is FFXIV itself.

People seemingly have no backwards mirrors considering what people are saying about Dawntrail, I've been saying ever since ARR.
All the times we had to move 3 steps and talk to Alphinaud because "He has something to say", drove me insane. I hated the Scions with fervor.
The story is... Pretty awful with the exception of Stormblood and Endwalker, and yes I am in the minority in that but I have met others who share my point of view.

The issue now can be gleamed at when you read about why Master Role Quests are a thing; "The players growing influence and notoriety".
We're already a Godslayer, immortal killing machine and reborn Ancient in the modern day. No one could ever live-up or outdo is.
This, is ridiculous. I hate this isekai-wannabe story of one person who is the strongest one ever. That's not what I play MMO's for.

So, overall this is a defense of Yoshi P.

( PS. Not to mention that FFXIV lack a consistent style. I miss the ARR outfits that looked like they belonged to the world compared to these... futuristic and modern jeans and stuff.. )
He isn't the issue and people who say he is doesn't see the forest for the trees—presumably the same people who wasn't bothered by Alphinaud wants to talk yet are somehow bothered by Wukky.
It's just reactionary people reactionary to Dawntrail's re-action...! Or something!

That's my two gil's on this.

[Rueby]

The issue isn't Yoshi P.
The issue is FFXIV itself.

People seemingly have no backwards mirrors considering what people are saying about Dawntrail, I've been saying ever since ARR.
All the times we had to move 3 steps and talk to Alphinaud because "He has something to say", drove me insane. I hated the Scions with fervor.
The story is... Pretty awful with the exception of Stormblood and Endwalker, and yes I am in the minority in that but I have met others who share my point of view.

The issue now can be gleamed at when you read about why Master Role Quests are a thing; "The players growing influence and notoriety".
We're already a Godslayer, immortal killing machine and reborn Ancient in the modern day. No one could ever live-up or outdo is.
This, is ridiculous. I hate this isekai-wannabe story of one person who is the strongest one ever. That's not what I play MMO's for.

So, overall this is a defense of Yoshi P.

( PS. Not to mention that FFXIV lack a consistent style. I miss the ARR outfits that looked like they belonged to the world compared to these... futuristic and modern jeans and stuff.. )
He isn't the issue and people who say he is doesn't see the forest for the trees—presumably the same people who wasn't bothered by Alphinaud wants to talk yet are somehow bothered by Wukky.
It's just reactionary people reactionary to Dawntrail's re-action...! Or something!

That's my two gil's on this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Alphinaud meant to be our 'voice'? Since the player isn't really voiced, we almost speak through him and 'nod' occasionally. While for me Wuk Lamat is much worse, because we're sidelined completely, it doesn't help that the writing/va is really poor.

I also hate all the scions (maybe some more than others), I didn't really hate Alphi much, he was annoying but tolerable. Wuk Lamat for me is....too much.

[Talamh]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Alphinaud meant to be our 'voice'? Since the player isn't really voiced, we almost speak through him and 'nod' occasionally. While for me Wuk Lamat is much worse, because we're sidelined completely, it doesn't help that the writing/va is really poor.

I also hate all the scions (maybe some more than others), I didn't really hate Alphi much, he was annoying but tolerable. Wuk Lamat for me is....too much.

... I sure hope that's not the case because never has Alphinaud spoken for my views at all x.x
I feel more intuned with my characters /emotes than Alphinauds views ever.

[BakoolJaJa]

A lot of us were there for WoW and Destiny 2's transformation into "the villain," (it's complicated and I don't feel like picking different words ) and they're scared that it's going to happen here now. That's why everyone is blowing up rn.

I do think that YoshiP stepping down would be the worst possible thing for this game tho. The folks who think that's a good thing have no idea how much of a death knell that would truly be, or how fortunate we are to have YoshiP at the helm of this game.

Humans are good at seeing patterns. Many other MMOs and live service games have gone through similar. It always starts out very mild. There is always a lot of defensiveness at first and hope that the things happening are just an outlier. That it's going to get better. The next expansion? They'll totally take the feedback to heart and fix things. Except somewhere in the back of our minds we realize that... this current situation isn't actually an outlier. That jobs have been getting dumbed down more and more since multiple expansions. That the story has been getting worse since the previous expansion. That many of the issues that were promised to get fixed (like the limited races) are in fact not getting fixed. That the encounter design fixes keep on getting delayed. That all the content and gameplay are incredibly stale, remaining unchanged since literally ARR. Etc. Dawntrail isn't SUDDENLY different and bad. It is just a progressive decline.

Like boiling a frog and all that.

And Yoshi P has absolutely nothing to do with anything. People keep on using him as a scapegoat or as some god who can do no wrong. Very convenient for Square Enix. The ones that are gladly leeching money off of ffxiv and giving nothing in return. The ones that are to blame for the team not having enough resources. The ones that will be to blame, should the game eventually go to shit similarly to Destiny and many others. But instead of paying attention to what they are doing, we are fixated on reading pointless Yoshi P interviews filled with PR talk, and acting like he is the singular entity working on the game. SE love him for that though.

Once he steps down... I genuinely think that will be it. Not because he is so great or because he is so terrible. Just because at that point Square Enix will be done with this game. Other than with using it as a cheap cash grab of course, but I will not be sticking around to play that.

[AnimaAnimus]

Yoshi P and the lead members of the development team did a wonderful job of this over the course of about a decade. It was a delight. I have noticed a strange behavior from the dev team since about this time last year that's been concerning however, and it's that they don't seem as engaged with us as they used to. It's like they've pulled back from the player base for some reason. .

I personally think they are just scared of not only the more common social backlashes and criticisms that are happening more and more as time passes, but also fear of trying something different and losing the casual and rp playerbase that they so heavily rely on. And that fear is causing them to spin out in a rut. Not only in a game perpective with the unwillingness to try things that are drastically different or design jobs in a way that it creates any sort of need for players to actually be fully engaged, but also with story perspective.

They don't want to do anything drastic. They will not have any conflict amongst the scions, they do not want us to face anything that will cause us to lose anymore so as not to upset the players that want everything rainbows and lollipops. And those kids are very loud and the tantrums are real. So much so that it is incredibly difficult to even make well thought out arguments because no matter how well you do, you get beat down, downvoted, and harrassed on social media. Which is why the forums come off as so negative, because its literally the only space we have to talk openly about what we don't like. So they just close themselves off and do what they think we want. And that not only severly limits what they can do but it also severely limits how they do it. Everything being solved with friendship, an already all too common trope in Japanese story telling, is so incredibly boring.

Let's face it. Endwalker should have been about war, it should have been dirty and gritty and put us through the paces. Zodiarc should never have been such a pushover, the Garleans should never have fallen off camera. The scions should have suffered loses. There should have been scenes that made us feel sad, angry or made us yell at our screens. When a story elicits emotions like that you know, as a writer, that you did well. But none of that stuff is safe. It will anger the fans who are scared of feeling anything negative. So now we are feeling angry, we are feeling sad and we are yelling at our screens, but in the wrong way.

This game was never suppsed to be this way. The original plan for HW was to make it really dark and gritty, which you can see in the trailer. But, according the Yoshida, the then CEO didn't like the idea and wanted to make it more light and happy to attract a wider audience. Which eventually led us to where we are today. Now we have that wider audience and they are made up of a bunch of emotionally immature kids who are holding the devs and metaphorical gunpoint, which is more damaging to the game then just letting creatives be creative.

[Connor]

This thread crops up pretty much every expansion too. If they were gonna kick Yoshi out they’d have done it by like the 4th thread calling for his resignation, but we’re on like 255 threads at this point lol