Korean FanFest Yoshida Interview

[Talael]

Who complained about the difficulty of the jobs in Heavensward? Those people never existed, we just had pld and whm crying their jobs were underperforming

I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time, DRG, suffered for quite a low magical defense that made fighting Phoenix in Final Coil a pain in the ass, cause of the constant flames of rebirth.

[Daralii]

Korean Fanfest was a few days ago and they did an interview with YoshiP, during this interview, Yoshida said that he believes FFXIV will continue to grow simply because "other games don’t have the weight of 10 years of growth behind them." This statement is concerning to me, as it seems he believes the game will keep being successful despite everything we have now (questionable story, tedious jobs, lack of content).

I can understand him to a degree, as people obviously develop an emotional attachment to their characters and the game and have established friend groups, but that didn't stop apathy from setting in and droves of people walking away from WoW during Warlords of Draenor(10-12 year mark), Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands.

And that he already has the story for 10.0 ready. He hopes to continue FFXIV for another 20 years.

If he's being genuine, that sounds completely delusional.

[Jeeqbit]

What I find interesting is that in this and previous interviews he repeatedly says that there exist different kinds of players and that they can’t be ignored for the other.

The positive side in me hopes that he means the complains of those who want more interesting jobs again. The pessimist sees it as a signal that ultra casuals and new players are the target.

I think that as he says, he wants to satisfy all sides. Which is what I'd expect to hear from someone running an MMORPG. But that means he has to split the workflow between them, resulting in both feeling like there's not enough of their type of content.

That said, raiders have never had it so good - between extreme, unreal, savage, criterion and its savage, ultimate and any other little challenges some of them like such as deep dungeons or duels, and now we're getting Chaos Raids and more Field Ops that could potentially include lots of CEs and another DRS (remains to be seen). And then there's BLU raiding. The scales tipped quite far to the high-end raid side.

How can they already work on things after 8.0 when they know that the story of DT wasn’t liked? Shouldn’t they be more careful here and actually look how people react to the patches first?

If it's decided, it was probably decided after all the backlash, because they were saying they were going to wait and see the reaction before it released. When they say they have an idea of the story up to there, it's a very vague idea and it can be significantly changed and reshaped based on feedback over time.

They don't really begin working on the expansion until after the .3 patch usually, by which time they've had chance to bounce ideas and flesh out the story and features.

I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time

Right but that wasn't because it made it "difficult" (which to be fair it kinda did because you had to master stance dancing). It was more because running around while attacking was fun and a unique thing about Bard that distinguished it from other ranged jobs.

I don't remember people complaining about job difficulty, but let's just say they avoided jobs due to the difficulty or played them extremely poorly and this would have been easy for the developers to notice, since it was obvious. An average person could enter a duty and let Blood of the Dragon expire, lose opportunities to use important attacks that affect their DPS, combos expire after just a few seconds or when using ranged attacks, procs could get overwritten easily wasting DPS, etc. None of which people have to navigate around now for the most part.

Questions about the difficulty were certainly brought up in interviews at least. I remember questions about "what jobs he'd recommend to people who want something simple" and he made his list and each time he was asked a question like this I saw the mentality shifting to where we are now, to where he'd pondered just making them all hard to mess up.

didn't stop apathy from setting in and droves of people walking away from WoW during Warlords of Draenor(10-12 year mark), Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands

It felt to me like the types who came over had only played several years. They were pretty invested, but hadn't necessarily been there since the start so it wasn't quite the same.

What changed with the awful misconduct media surrounding Blizzard is it gave the people who'd been there since the start the reason they needed to overcome the sunk-cost fallacy that was keeping them there. Some of them obviously just went back now, too, showing that they still just go back anyways.

Given the amount of Returners, that does happen with this game, just look out for all those flower icons in the game.

[Raven2014]

The only way I can see Yoshi's promise/dream can be realize is they need to put more people on this team. At the very least, they need a custodian team whose focus is not on creating new content but to address issue and solve problem in a timely manner, thing like Viera hat, adding beard to character maker, or class change have no business taking as long as they do and still nothing come out. For example the AST change, they knew it needs a rework and promised they would do it in ... 6.3 almost a year later. Than 6.3 came and they just handwave it away "nah, we'll do it in the next expansion please wait". Sure, 7.0 AST is nice ... but does it look like something I should have to waited almost 2 years to see happen? Absolutely not. Whether because they're are arrogant, or taking players for granted, or simply disconnect, it's bonker to see they thought it's not a big deal to tell people to wait for such a long time on a problem they acknowledge. It's the samething with things like Viera's hat, sometime I think the people who meme "small indie companies" are actually being too polite.

Like, this is a time where their competitors are constantly engaging the player base for feedback. I think this months I have filled out a few in-game survey for other games, and usually you can see these feed back reflected into the game 2-3 months down the line, comparing to FF14 where you shout at the them with a megaphone just to have them acknowledge it after a year, than maybe see it addressed after another year if you're lucky.

- If this is a mentality thing, that mentality has to change - pronto.

- If they don't have enough people, they need to hire more. If they have to hire a new designer whose job is solely to remodel all of the hat for Viera, that's what they must do.


The idea of a custodian team is to break the rigidness of the current development circle, and help address player's feedback as well as handle issues with more fluidity than current. And hopefully that'll allow the core team focusing on just creating new content and thus reduce the time between patches. Because I'm done with waiting 4-5 months in between. And no, I have no interest in his excuse about "we already have a lot of people or our staffs already overwork or we're trying to hire but can't find any", those are his problem, not mine. They have let this cashcow starve for so long, they have to feed it at any cost before the undernourishment cause permanent damage. Some would say it already did.

[BabyYoda]

The only way I can see Yoshi's promise/dream can be realize is they need to put more people on this team. At the very least, they need a custodian team whose focus is not on creating new content but to address issue and solve problem in a timely manner, thing like Viera hat, adding beard to character maker, or class change have no business taking as long as they do and still nothing come out. For example the AST change, they knew it needs a rework and promised they would do it in ... 6.3 almost a year later. Than 6.3 came and they just handwave it away "nah, we'll do it in the next expansion please wait". Sure, 7.0 AST is nice ... but does it look like something I should have to waited almost 2 years to see happen? Absolutely not. Whether because they're are arrogant, or taking players for granted, or simply disconnect, it's bonker to see they thought it's not a big deal to tell people to wait for such a long time on a problem they acknowledge. It's the samething with things like Viera's hat, sometime I think the people who meme "small indie companies" are actually being too polite.

Like, this is a time where their competitors are constantly engaging the player base for feedback. I think this months I have filled out a few in-game survey for other games, and usually you can see these feed back reflected into the game 2-3 months down the line, comparing to FF14 where you shout at the them with a megaphone just to have them acknowledge it after a year, than maybe see it addressed after another year if you're lucky.

- If this is a mentality thing, that mentality has to change - pronto.

- If they don't have enough people, they need to hire more. If they have to hire a new designer whose job is solely to remodel all of the hat for Viera, that's what they must do.


The idea of a custodian team is to break the rigidness of the current development circle, and help address player's feedback as well as handle issues with more fluidity than current. And hopefully that'll allow the core team focusing on just creating new content and thus reduce the time between patches. Because I'm done with waiting 4-5 months in between. And no, I have no interest in his excuse about "we already have a lot of people or our staffs already overwork or we're trying to hire but can't find any", those are his problem, not mine. They have let this cashcow starve for so long, they have to feed it at any cost before the undernourishment cause permanent damage. Some would say it already did.

It already did,
I lost faith and I cannot trust Yoshi P team anymore until I see changes with my own eyes

[Valence]

The uptick in difficulty has been pretty universally praised. Your mileage may vary I suppose.

Ah, that makes sense if the sorry state of encounter design was merely about difficulty in casual dungeons I guess..

[Tykku]

I'm actually quite pleased to hear he has plans for at least 3 more expansions. It's exciting to think this game will continue for that long.

While every decision doesn't line up exactly with how I'd love to experience the game you're never going to please everyone. My only recent complaint is the new raid series was a little too easy, but other than that it's been great.

Please don't lose hope devs, for every person complaining there's 20 of us who are content with where the game is. <3

[AnimaAnimus]

I recall lots of ppl mad at the "bow mage" and my main job at the time

Well that was due to how silly of a design that was, not because it was too difficult to play. Who plays a ranger, sorry "bard", and wants casting bars added to basic pew pew attacks? Esp considering archer/bard did not have them in 1.0 or 2.0 which made it a shock and completely changed the way the job was played, and not in a good way.

They have a tendancy to make extremely bad design choices, that anyone who has played rpgs at all would look at and say, 'that is not good, don't do that' and then blame the players for negative feedback and act confused by what we want.

[Doragan]

Well that was due to how silly of a design that was, not because it was too difficult to play. Who plays a ranger, sorry "bard", and wants casting bars added to basic pew pew attacks?

Me, actually. I really enjoyed that slidecasting part of the job back in the day, but having almost-total mobility in ARR to being anchored in the span of two years wasn't a good idea. I significantly prefered it on MCH when you just had to charge the 1st shot, and the current PvP kits where you can move while shooting. Even if you get to move slower, it is great imo. I want more of that.

[Archeron]

It takes money to make money.

It's quite obvious this game needs more staff, and more talent. A custodian team solving issues they've left in the game for years would be a major first step in solving the communities grievances. But the second step I think they need to take is more clearly communicating with the community, and not just giving us snipets of information in highly curated interviews. There is a clear disconnect between the developers, and directors (Yoshi P) and the general sentiment of the communities who play this game. The raiders aren't being listened to, Healers aren't being listened to, PvP players aren't being listened to, it seems like they only care to pander to the casual audience of this game who started the game within the last 3 years and still are catching up with much content left to do. Everyone else is no longer that target audience, and thus they do not care what veteran players think so long as they have new players to replace them. Fill the game with an extremely casual audience, and keep replacing those who reach the end of the content cycle.