Opinion: The Development Team should revert to Q&A for Livestreams

[Jeeqbit]

It's been said that FFXIV's media was set up is the way it currently is with the intent of being a dialogue between the devs and the playerbase.

Live letters were, yes. The idea of them was that it was revolutionary for the industry to do it. Which I'm not so sure about. Every other MMORPG has done streams since the early 2010s as well, and before we had the universally good data transfer speeds we have now, many of them at least had forums. Whether they actually listened to them will certainly have varied, but bug reports are important for developers so they needed to be able to see feedback.

Most likely thinking of streams was a natural idea given twitch becoming a thing and good data transfer speeds being more widespread.

1.0 didn't even have player forums

You can access the 1.0 forums right now, so they did have them. In fact, it was the few people on the forums white knighting for them that motivated them to remake the game in the first place. If there wasn't a few people that still believed in the game somewhere in the fog, it would have been harder to continue.

They even had them for FF11. The reason this forum software is from the early 2000s is because they just copied FF11's forum infrastructure.

I agree there should be Q&A or some way to give productive feedback. Square Enix can eat the cost of paying people to moderate those questions to lessen the negative impact on devs if need be.

Arguably that's exactly what they did with the Q&A in the last live letter. The feedback was obviously sifted through and presented as politely-worded questions. It would be nice if those Q&As happened more.

But really, I do think they are listening but what they are doing is reflecting the improvements in new content. For example, people would say how the battles had got boring so their focus has been to make new ones more exciting and they have felt more exciting.

A lot of the complaints, if you think about it, are more about old things. Old open world. Abandoned systems that haven't been improved to reflect 2025. All sorts of quality of life issues like housing, annoying settings. The battle processing, or available actions at lower levels, or how interesting all the old roulette content is and how squishy old hunts are. Even Dawntrail's base MSQ is now "old and abandoned" so they won't act on feedback for it.

It comes down to that no matter how much they improve new things, the old things are mostly abandoned and seen as yesterday's news, and that's slowly been building resentment.

[HyperiusUltima]

But really, I do think they are listening but what they are doing is reflecting the improvements in new content. For example, people would say how the battles had got boring so their focus has been to make new ones more exciting and they have felt more exciting.

Only now because we've complained about nearly every aspect of Dawntrail content except the Raid Tier. I wonder if it's because they had an actual good story and raid content in there aside from the first tier?

A lot of the complaints, if you think about it, are more about old things.

Yes and no. Old things such as the overworld sure - I can grasp that considering the main complaint about that has been that the overworld is mostly "empty" because we don't have people running around except those in the MSQ. They've tried to mitigate that by adding the Shared FATE system, which leaves a lot to do if you plan on getting anything with vouchers. What they're complaining about the most right now is how every piece of new content isn't good.

- Chaotic was a complete and utter failure on release due to how strict mechanics were for 24 people to complete - and I highly doubt they'll give another Chaotic again after the backlash.

- Cosmic Exploration got an immense amount of flak due to Gatherers not recovering GP after completion, the content essentially becoming FOMO in terms of progress because of how the FATEs are scheduled, and what's worse than taking a battery out of a robot and putting in a new one when we got completely new systems called RED ALERTS utilizing the Crafting and Gathering System as it should? Not to mention, people abandoning it after they've achieved their goal(which can be whatever that is, probably crafting relic).

- Now, Occult Crescent is under fire not only for not having a normal mode Forked Tower like Bozja did, but also for making us do instance prog. They addressed those issues in the live stream...which won't happen until 7.3. Thanks Yoshida.

People are less annoyed by how old systems are than they are about the content that's coming out of the pipeline. Post-patch Endwalker was a disaster outside of the raids story-wise. Dawntrail? Moreso. As for the questions on live stream, it wouldn't surprise me that Yoshida himself made some questions based on the feedback they got out of Occult Crescent and Cosmic Exploration that were glaring that he had to address them before it mounted up to content being dead on arrival like Chaotic nearly was. As I've said already, we really need a Q&A section with questions given by players themselves that are constructive and point out specific issues without them cherry-picking.