Live letters have lost their magic - Zepla

[ElysiumDragon]

and what grounds do you have to infer what the motivation behind the criticism? Again, people have been ignored, neglected and met with passive aggressive response when creating criticisms for long before this time, and with time, peoples' patience is only going to wear thin over time.

To posit a simple question... If the population is in a decline, and if the trend is statistically visible, and if this decline is associated with the content pipeline, and if the developers show no motivation of changing that content pipeline, then why shouldn't people be more critical of the developers and their structure?

To make it better... People have been making these comments for well over 5 years, and they have been ignored for well over 5 years, and now the population direction is clearly supporting that their pipeline just isn't working -- and guess what? Still ignored.

How much longer do people need to complain in a civil manner.. How many more times must they repeat the same criticism on ad nauseum, how much lower does the population need to decline before the developers realize that maybe they should start acknowledging the issues at least and providing a reason or an outline as to what they are doing, as opposed to vague remarks like "We've been too relaxed"... All of this would be OK, if they could establish themselves against a core demographic, but they haven't.. It's just a constant yo-yo, and people wondering why people take an issue with it.

Now if we want to continue the speculative nature of "What's the motivation for this" -- Why has the response now turned from "Ur a minoritahh", people that enjoy the game are a majoritah.. "Population is increasing"... "This happens all the time" ---- To now being concerned with trying to do psychanalysis on peoples' motivation for making the criticism.

Maybe you aren't encompassed in this, but a lot of people are less concerned with why, or trying to do some reasoning, and are much more concerned with how they can undermine the complaints, and trying to speculate on motivation as a means to undermine the complaint,

This whole thing works in both ways.. Not just the people making the criticisms.

I want things to improve, same as anyone else. Heck, there's another comment on here of me going over several things in the game I don't like, so it's not like I'm some glorified 'white knight' looking to 'protect the billion-dollar corporation'.

What doesn't help, what allows some people, or even the devs, to point and say "This criticisms are in bad faith, we should dismiss them", or just tune out from whatever's being said, is slop like Pyre's video, which is 5 valid complaints wrapped up in an hour of ragebaiting, vagueposting (game bad, game dying, game stale), and grifting for clicks.

[Kazuke_Miso]

I want things to improve, same as anyone else. Heck, there's another comment on here of me going over several things in the game I don't like, so it's not like I'm some glorified 'white knight' looking to 'protect the billion-dollar corporation'.

What doesn't help, what allows some people, or even the devs, to point and say "This criticisms are in bad faith, we should dismiss them", or just tune out from whatever's being said, is slop like Pyre's video, which is 5 valid complaints wrapped up in an hour of ragebaiting, vagueposting (game bad, game dying, game stale), and grifting for clicks.

She literally explained multiple issues with the game like the stalking plugin, healer gameplay, patch cadence but OK.

I'm sorry but you ARE a white knight and your throwaway fake concerns to make you seem like you aren't completely biased does not make you not a white knight. It just means you went an extra step to pretend to be reasonable when the 99% of the other posts you make are all concern trolling and tone policing.

[Rithy255]

I'm super woke but DT put me to sleep.

I'd likely fall under the "woke" labelling myself (I personally think it's a silly buzzword people tend to overuse to much now it's got no meaning). This doesn't stop me from not liking DT either, I don't understand why liking DT vs not liking DT has anything to do with being "woke" but I guess here we are...

though my issues with DT even far exceed just the story (because as much as i like the story up to shadowbringers it's not important to me that DT is bad) but it's the fact the gameplay is really in a bad state right now in my opinion.

[ElysiumDragon]

She literally explained multiple issues with the game like the stalking plugin, healer gameplay, patch cadence but OK.

I'm sorry but you ARE a white knight and your throwaway fake concerns to make you seem like you aren't completely biased does not make you not a white knight. It just means you went an extra step to pretend to be reasonable when the 99% of the other posts you make are all concern trolling and tone policing.

You're absolutely right, I should stop trying to be tactful and evasive about my overall feelings.

"Stalking plugin"

Yep, SE messed up there, and the devs should communicate better. Big difference between "we asked them nicely" and "we threatened to sue them into the poorhouse if they didn't purge everything". That's on them.

"Healer gameplay"

Gonna be honest, this is an actual difference of opinion. Aside from White Mage, I really don't think the other jobs need extra DPS buttons, at least at the moment. What DOES need to change is high-end encounter design, as there's far too much downtime between damage, which is what leads to Glare spam complaints. More instances of Natural Alignment-esque mechanics, less instances of long damage downtime would be ideal. (Though people malded about Abyssos having bleeds, sooo...)

"Patch cadence"

I get why the devs don't release exploration zones early (Diadem, Pagos), but they really should at least throw something grindy and casual-friendly into the base expansion or .1 patch, perhaps an early form of relic grind. .1 patches are by far the worst to sit through, so agreed.

Heck, I'll throw in one of my own:

The Savage loot system and overall gearing is in dire need of improvement. The game advertises itself as "all jobs on one character", but the current gearing system undermines that. Chaotic is a good start, but the loot system and tome cap are long overdue a rework. Perhaps ditching the coffers limit for the same rule as the Normal Mode raids, and raising the cap to 900 in the off-patch could be a good start?

So yeah, like I said, 5 valid complaints wrapped up in an hour of ragebaiting, vagueposting (stale how?), and grifting for clicks (permadeath? Really? The thing the devs purged because it was genuinely godawful game design?).

[Supersnow845]

You're absolutely right, I should stop trying to be tactful and evasive about my overall feelings.

"Stalking plugin"

Yep, SE messed up there, and the devs should communicate better. Big difference between "we asked them nicely" and "we threatened to sue them into the poorhouse if they didn't purge everything". That's on them.

"Healer gameplay"

Gonna be honest, this is an actual difference of opinion. Aside from White Mage, I really don't think the other jobs need extra DPS buttons, at least at the moment. What DOES need to change is high-end encounter design, as there's far too much downtime between damage, which is what leads to Glare spam complaints. More instances of Natural Alignment-esque mechanics, less instances of long damage downtime would be ideal. (Though people malded about Abyssos having bleeds, sooo...)

"Patch cadence"

I get why the devs don't release exploration zones early (Diadem, Pagos), but they really should at least throw something grindy and casual-friendly into the base expansion or .1 patch, perhaps an early form of relic grind. .1 patches are by far the worst to sit through, so agreed.

Heck, I'll throw in one of my own:

The Savage loot system and overall gearing is in dire need of improvement. The game advertises itself as "all jobs on one character", but the current gearing system undermines that. Chaotic is a good start, but the loot system and tome cap are long overdue a rework. Perhaps ditching the coffers limit for the same rule as the Normal Mode raids, and raising the cap to 900 in the off-patch could be a good start?

So yeah, like I said, 5 valid complaints wrapped up in an hour of ragebaiting, vagueposting (stale how?), and grifting for clicks (permadeath? Really? The thing the devs purged because it was genuinely godawful game design?).

Just to point out high end encounter design discouraging healers from actually healing by having so little to heal is just as much of the problem as the nature of the damage rotation (side note why do you think WHM should get more but not say SCH who has the fewest options for damage) and both fall into the problem of healer gameplay. You also have to remember that upping high end damage design doesn’t fix casual content. Do you think it’s balanced the tank is healing itself while you literally only have AOW to spam as an example.

Also side note abyssos having bleeds was a problem precisely because the bleed snapshotted the initial damage mitigation. So people would under mitigate the initial hit, try to mitigate after the fact then blame the healer for underhealing when really the others undermitigated

[Gurgeh]

I want things to improve, same as anyone else. Heck, there's another comment on here of me going over several things in the game I don't like, so it's not like I'm some glorified 'white knight' looking to 'protect the billion-dollar corporation'.

What doesn't help, what allows some people, or even the devs, to point and say "This criticisms are in bad faith, we should dismiss them", or just tune out from whatever's being said, is slop like Pyre's video, which is 5 valid complaints wrapped up in an hour of ragebaiting, vagueposting (game bad, game dying, game stale), and grifting for clicks.

My take is different. I think every 'complaint' was valid. Yes the tone of the video wasn't very 'professionally diplomatic', but it was for their own 'fun'.
If Square expect their gamers to write a concise memo, with accompanying PowerPoint presentation, or have so little emotional maturity that they can't get past the 'bend over' jokes... then we truly are fckd.

But I think Lucy's message was more to us players.
You can't change people so it's not going to happen, but it is I think more try to get white knights that they are the ones who need to STFU or leave and go play other games, or just accept that they will always be surrounded by once new players but now veterans, who've sat at end game for a couple of years, and are sick and tired of the game's various issues which is nothing really changes, nothing gets better, it just slowly but surely gets worse and worse.

[ForsakenRoe]

"Healer gameplay"

Gonna be honest, this is an actual difference of opinion. Aside from White Mage, I really don't think the other jobs need extra DPS buttons, at least at the moment. What DOES need to change is high-end encounter design, as there's far too much downtime between damage, which is what leads to Glare spam complaints. More instances of Natural Alignment-esque mechanics, less instances of long damage downtime would be ideal. (Though people malded about Abyssos having bleeds, sooo...)

This one jumped out at me and I feel compelled to debunk/respond. Sure, add Natural Alignment style mechanics to every fight. New problem, they're hard as heck to heal through in the minimum gear (eg the crafted set) but as you get gear from clearing the Savage, you need to heal less and less. Eventually, we're back at the same point we're at now, where you handle the whole thing with way less 'Healing GCDs' used. What started as 'put Regen on both purples, and keep up Medica2 through the whole mechanic' as WHM, eventually became 'use just one Medica2 for the whole thing, the rest is handled with Raptures and OGCDs'. So, back where we started after a few weeks, and the problem remains unsolved. Additionally, that's Savage. A solution that doesn't tackle all levels of content is no solution at all (in my view), and the lower level the content (EX roulettes, Maps, etc), the more desperately changes are needed

People said that EX was 'fixed' and 'fun again' because the Dolls at the end of Strayborough spammed those raidwides and it did 'so much damage'. Now we have to GCD Heal again! Only, once we got 10 item levels by going from AF gear to Tome, we needed to GCD heal a lot less, and could instead get away with using 'all of our OGCDs and it sorta works'. Then, we get 10 more item levels from NM Raid/Crafted, and suddenly we don't need to even use our entire OGCD kit. Now, some of us have BIS at 730, and it's a joke to heal through, to the point where we don't even need a Healer in the party to get past it, the Tank can do the Healing.

Point is, 'more healing required' is a very ephemeral solution, dependent entirely on being at a certain gear level, and once you outgear it, the extra difficulty quickly falls away because of how fast we scale in output when we get more gear

If SE wants to give us a way to need to heal more, they could consider adding Heal Absorbtion'(though I'd call it Aetherblight, so it has a more thematic name)' as a mechanic for Healers to handle. Maybe that'd also help curb how strong Tank healing actions are (eg a Tank could clear their own Aetherblight with ease, but they can't clear the whole party in time due to the CD on tools like Bloodwhetting)

Also, WHM has more damage options than SCH (due to Misery's interactions), so why is SCH not deserving of extra actions? If anything, I'd argue that ALL of the Healers should get at least one new action, and some could reduce how many 'new' buttons they need added by simply shortening the DOT timer, such that we're needing to press it more often. The one exception to this would be AST, if, and only if, they can make the card system be a functional replacement for the 'additional DPS actions' the other Healers would get (thereby making AST's gameplay focus be on 'buff allies', rather than 'do damage yourself')

Looking at direct competition, not only do I have to press my Healing GCDs more often (a lot more often), I also have access to three DOTs on my spec (Resto Druid), and if I rejigged my talents specifically to maximise how many I have, I could have up to SIX. 'More damage buttons' and 'more healing demanded of the player' are not mutually exclusive.

[Velthice]

I think it's hilarious that people try to frame Lucy as "grifting for clicks" when she almost certainly took a loss by spending the time to make a video in the first place

She doesn't need to talk about xiv. Her regular audience doesn't care about xiv. She has a successful twitch career and collabs with some of the biggest names in the vtubing indie scene (Filian, Bao, Neuro-sama, etc...), and shes till took the time anyway to research and put together a video criticizing a game she's clearly passionate about. Meanwhile xiv is twitch kryptonite that can't even clear the viewership of runescape, yet people still cling to the idea that anyone making a video being critical of xiv is "attention seeking" because they just can't fathom that someone they once associated with xiv could possible be more successful by abandoning the game

All this is to say, nobody cares about xiv except xiv players, and that's not a big enough audience to bother grifting. Any content creator actually looking to make a quick buck would be better served by making a video about literally anything else.

[ReynTime]

If anything actual, serious "woke" people like the postcolonial anthropologists will get an aneurysm going through the story.

I find it so hilarious that so many of the "woke" fans of FF14 defend DT to death and called it peak writing and more importantly scold others for lacking media literacy. These people unironically believe that most folks hated DT because it embraced multiculturalism and featured minorities.

The people who actually lack media literacy are exactly these white knights. They've got to read Edward Said's Orientalism or something like that. Because THE ENTIRE MSQ IS FULL OF TROPES. Every single tribe WAS A TROPE. The Pelupelu are nothing more than TRADE TRADE BARTER BARTER. The Hanu are so helpless they can't figure out their crops and they have to be TAUGHT their cultural traditions by a "Westerner" from Eorzea. Half the culture in Tuliyollal was just TACOS FOOD TACOS.

It reveals so, so much that certain segments of the playerbase virtue signal about being so woke and so aware and so embracing of multiculturalism and yet loved Dawntrail. And it's because they probably see IRL cultures and peoples as nothing more than their tropes. They are the essentializer, the people who Orientalize foreign cultures. Seriously, I don't know how anyone who's interested in "wokeness" or serious cultural representation would unironically love that LatAm representation in this game is just TACOS! TACOS!

These aren't real NPCs. They exist only to give WoL and co a sightseeing tour among the oh so exotic cultures of the New World.

It's usually white americans who may have 1/5 of latin american lineage and barely know a couple sentences in spanish who scream that you're being a bigot attacking their desire to be represented or some nonsense like that. The usual people who think they can speak for minorities they're not part of, angrily witch hunting online from the comfort of their north american suburbs.

Speaking as someone actually born and raised in a latin american country, Dawntrail's cartoony, stereotypical, childishly utopic depiction of a fantasy latin america is borderline insulting. XIV barely depicts its version of latin american inspired culture with any more realism than hollywood did in the 80s. It's not anything more than a developed country's idealistic vision and the phony accents done by americans who think having family origins in hispanic countries they didn't grow up in or brazil suddenly makes them some kind of authority only add to the insult.

I absolutely despise american voice acting's obsession with forcing accents into foreign characters unless it's the rare case like Erenville being voiced by someone who actually speaks that way naturally for being raised IN the environment.

[Illianaro]

This is one of the patterns that I have witnessed here and in Reddit regarding any criticism being raised about this game and SE, particularly by any individuals who have platforms on YouTube, twitch, etc. They are treated as darlings of the community when they are happy and positive about the game, but the moment they express dissatisfaction about the direction things are headed, the community instantly turns on them. It doesn’t matter if they played for years and years. It doesn’t matter if they have expressed deep, abiding passion and love for this game. The moment they give even the most measured of criticism - let alone unfiltered or impassioned critique - they are suddenly “grifters” and spoken of as if they have somehow “betrayed” the community.

Nevermind the overhead that goes into releasing hour-plus long videos that are so clearly filled with love and care. Nevermind that it is likely a LOSS for the content creator to put such videos together and share. They have a platform - one that SE has been shown to listen to in the past - and they are leveraging their platform to speak out and be heard. Instead of seeing this as a labor of love by people who want this game to not only survive but thrive, it’s easier to write them off as grifters and stick our heads in the sand. It’s “no true Scotsman” made manifest.

Then there are the complaints about the “tone” of criticism that I see everywhere. Using a harsher tone doesn’t automatically make your criticism less valid. A lot of the current tone is the result of years of members of this community feeling like they are shouting at a brick wall. Content creators like Zepla and Lucy Pyre have been trying to say since EW that this game is heading in an unhealthy direction. Even when they give a measured response, people find excuses to dismiss them instead of considering that - amid the “tone” - there could be merit in what they are saying.