Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[W00by]

Hot take
I think the job design in this game has always been best when they follow their own vision and don't bow down to player feedback. Player feedback gave us the awful DRK rework and other awful reworks and homogenization. When SE is free to design jobs the way they intend they are great. I think they should listen to players less actually.

I actually don't disagree with this sentiment. A lot of the time, feedback is a really poor motivator to make certain changes, and many of the best changes don't come from feedback (I don't think anyone was asking for the Tsubame change, for example, but it's really good). But the problem here is that they're listening to some feedback and not others. We're all saying we didn't want VPR changed/want it to be reverted, and they have admitted openly they are currently ignoring our feedback. Simultaneously, they said they made the change in response to feedback, in both the Job Guide and the initial announcement of the changes.

So, they are listening to feedback, just not all of it. And that's why people are frustrated, I think. Also, I wrote a whole thread about this that's currently on the front page, but I would be a lot more comfortable in them "sticking with their guns" if they knew what their guns even were. Yoshi-P claims they were working on VPR, agonizing over what to do with it until the very last day, and I mean, hell, clearly even after the very last day judging by the fact that it's received changes in every patch with adjustments so far. So how can I feel good about them sticking to their guns if, by their own admission, they aren't confident when they ship things? You would hope the Job that was announced first, the flagship Job of the expansion, would've had a confident design direction from day one that they were planning to implement and that it would've been finished earlier and only need small adjustments after. The fact that a Job was reworked a few days after release when they had plenty of time to sort out what they wanted it to be internally should be all the proof you need that they're not currently capable of deciding what to do by themselves. (If you want more detail on this subject, please refer to my other thread.)

If they don't know what they're doing, they should try to form a consensus with players about what everyone wants. I'm not confident in their ability to steer things by themselves after this expansion.