Quote Originally Posted by Vanguail View Post
MMO players are an aging player base. Many of us have careers and families but still want to support the game.
There are a lot of older players and people with families, going right into the 50s at this point for really old MMO players. And I met people in their 60s playing occasionally long ago, but that was rare, probably gonna get increasingly common though.

But older players and people with families have always played MMOs. It's always been a good way for partners to bond fighting fantastical bosses together. Real life isn't quite as exciting as that, after all. And people have always met partners through MMOs too, as much as journalists only "discover" it as if it's new thing every so often.

I know from my frequent use of discord that lots of 18-22 years olds play this game or are getting into this game though. It's not as if MMOs (or at least this game) is exclusive to older players in their 30s-50s. That's a myth. We are just at a point where MMO populations have a very diverse range of ages and where 50 year olds in general have a higher chance of being gamers than in the 90s.
To me it feels like the devs are catering too much to the streamer style of gamer.
Doubtful. I think they just wanted to make more large-scale content so that the game feels alive, after how socially isolated and solo-oriented Endwalker was. The problem is just how the body checks make things a little too punishing than they seem to be intending. It happened with Chaotic, and now Forked Tower, both of which overshot their goals for difficulty.
Nothing against them, but I don't see how some of their design decisions make sense otherwise. Although I can't wrap my head around many of the design decisions in OC.
They've admitted even they didn't understand their own design decisions and just slapped things together without thinking about things like the entry properly.

The irony is they have all these procedures that are meant to make design robust and considered, and all those procedures tripped them up to the point where the opposite happened.
Quote Originally Posted by Kirutsuki View Post
Players are both fed up with formulaic content
Formulas are fine, but obviously there needs to be a certain degree of difference and variety in that formulaic content, and sometimes there isn't quite enough. For example, a routine "field operation" is fine, but doing something considerably different with it is nice - for example, having us dive underwater and battle enemies under the sea and find treasure in shells and amongst seaweed, then having special actions that take advantage of the fact we are surrounded by water and make use of the physics that come with that.
they're so set on their ways of formulaic update cycles that they can't provide a hotfix unless it's RMT related.
The main issue with it is that they want it to go through their QA process, which can take 1-2 weeks at minimum, and that doesn't take into account if they find a bug that is challenging to fix and takes time to figure out how to solve. Although rare, there can be sneaky bugs that are complex and difficult to identify the root of. Given it's a large-scale game with people's player data on the line, they don't want anything to wreck their character data, so that's why it will need to take some time.

It will also relate to how they manage their branches, since they've said they have one for each patch.