I like how Yoship keeps taking the wrong points from feedback.

[RedLolly]

Two of the issues they have are:

1. They really don't know their own users. This was clearly shown in the 7.3 PLL where they addressed Forked Tower, how their idea was that 24 experienced players would guide 24 new players through it. When reality is, your players just don't act like that. At this point they should already know this.

2. They need to look at a piece of content and ask "is this fun?". Best example is Island Sanctuary. Who in their right mind look at a sweat shop manager game and said "this is good and fun"?.

1) It's extremely common for an experienced player to help newbies. Just never before on that scale and difficulty and it was horrid timing for NA and EU.

2) The type of person that develops games looks at numbers and planning and management and gets the dopamine from making it work


I ain't saying it's good, I'm just saying I get how it happened.

[Mouthbone]

I love spreadsheets, planning and management - Island Sanctuary was (and still is) an extremely miserable experience to me
The clunkiness and lack of QoL makes me not want to engage with the content even though the rewards are very desireable
I imagine most people only enjoyed the first 30 minutes of Island Sanctuary, before it was bogged down by the workshop and the mind-numbing resource gathering
Whoever was directing Island Sanctuary development should never be allowed to enter the kitchen ever again

[NegativeS]

Every NA, EU, OCE player, shouting to the heavens: "MAKE CLASSES MORE ENGAGING! GIVE MORE WORLD CONTENT! FREE UP GLAMOUR!"

SE: "Zzz..."

One high-level JP raider: "Make X class easier to make my parses look better! And make it easier to level. Spend all remaining dev time on DDR raids."

SE: "Yes sir, glory to the RFWF adminstration"

I think this is just punishment for getting attached to a game made by an east-asian developer. You've seen the type of gacha to come out of there, their consumer bases just have... different ideas as to what a good game looks like.

[Valence]

To be honest I have a feeling that SE has a specific problem when it comes to new optional content, notably when they try to develop something new like Island. They start working on it too late and probably can only test it after it's done, so if it's not good, not much they can do about it because they planned and announced it for release at patch X anyway. And adding to this, they also don't talk to players to get any feedback anyway, so it essentially ends up being like throwing darts at the wall and hope something sticks.

[FeyFavilla]

To be honest I have a feeling that SE has a specific problem when it comes to new optional content, notably when they try to develop something new like Island. They start working on it too late and probably can only test it after it's done, so if it's not good, not much they can do about it because they planned and announced it for release at patch X anyway. And adding to this, they also don't talk to players to get any feedback anyway, so it essentially ends up being like throwing darts at the wall and hope something sticks.

Probably a big issue at the core of things, yeah. Instead of hiring dedicated game testers they could let the community test for them with beta servers. That way they could not only stress-test systems but also hear a wider range of feedback to give them a better idea about the consensus as a whole, not just 'does it work'.

[Mouthbone]

People asking for test servers once they realize the devs don't take tester feedback into account, just like WoW:

[Kisshu]

1) It's extremely common for an experienced player to help newbies. Just never before on that scale and difficulty and it was horrid timing for NA and EU.

Not sure what you mean by timing, Forked Tower was released at a point where it didn't clash with anything from my knowledge. Were you thinking about Chaotic's release just before Christmas last year?

I agree that it's common for experienced players to help new players. But it seems that as soon as one player / a few players are able to wipe the alliance, it seems the player base changes mentality. From my observations.

Probably a big issue at the core of things, yeah. Instead of hiring dedicated game testers they could let the community test for them with beta servers. That way they could not only stress-test systems but also hear a wider range of feedback to give them a better idea about the consensus as a whole, not just 'does it work'.

They need to have a place where they experiment and get players to try it out. Just something simple for combat, same basic animation for all actions, focus on the tweaks and numbers. Test out how it feels. Perhaps one test-session they individually tweak all GCD values on each job, from very fast(1.5 sec) to slow(3 sec), then add some abilities to the jobs. Maybe next test session will be a full change of raid wide buffs. And so on.
I get the feeling at this point, that they only test out the newest jobs and call it a day. Means we're burdened by all the tweaks they've made over the years on old jobs, and it adds up.

[RedLolly]

Not sure what you mean by timing, Forked Tower was released at a point where it didn't clash with anything from my knowledge. Were you thinking about Chaotic's release just before Christmas last year?

I agree that it's common for experienced players to help new players. But it seems that as soon as one player / a few players are able to wipe the alliance, it seems the player base changes mentality. From my observations.



They need to have a place where they experiment and get players to try it out. Just something simple for combat, same basic animation for all actions, focus on the tweaks and numbers. Test out how it feels. Perhaps one test-session they individually tweak all GCD values on each job, from very fast(1.5 sec) to slow(3 sec), then add some abilities to the jobs. Maybe next test session will be a full change of raid wide buffs. And so on.
I get the feeling at this point, that they only test out the newest jobs and call it a day. Means we're burdened by all the tweaks they've made over the years on old jobs, and it adds up.

I was. My error!


And I love that idea!

[Jeeqbit]

MMOs as a whole don't seem to be gaining new players

I don't agree with that. This MMO gains new players. I know because I am in places where I can see the age of many players. While many are in their 30s, many are actually around 20-22.

Which means that in order to have played MMOs for a long time, they would have to have been playing since they became a teenager, and that's still not long relative to 30-50 year olds that have played them since the 2000s.

It is rather that certain MMOs don't gain new players, due to having poor systems that turn off new players quickly, or have a reputation for being riddled with toxic veteran players that are very unwelcoming.

While many people like to say that MMOs are now only a tiny percentage of the internet, it is important to clarify that the majority of the internet is mobile users, games consoles, casual family machines or business computers. Obviously. So if you subtract all those, you arrive back at the sort of "hardcore PC users" you had in the 2000s.

And those "hardcore PC users" are a higher percentage than they were back then and many of them still play MMOs or have at some point, hence the "30 million adventurers" SE is keen to boast about. One way or another, millions of people have attempted to play the game at some point since 2010.

I think MMOs have lagged behind other games, and need to evolve.

Perhaps, but on the other hand it may be better to think of all live service games generally to find this desired innovation.

I don't think it's wrong to look at mobile games, but they do need to acknowledge that the PC market is literally this game's niche that it holds a large amount of market share and awareness in, and trading that to be "just another mobile game", especially when we already have an FFXIV Mobile version already now, isn't very wise.

their idea was that 24 experienced players would guide 24 new players through it. When reality is, your players just don't act like that. At this point they should already know this.

Actually, players would do that, but the content has to be designed correctly for it. If only 24 people have to do mechanics and the other 24 people can get every single mechanic wrong, then absolutely, the other 24 people can and will carry them.

After all, you see it with Alliance Raids. Lots of people can wipe in these or in Delubrum Reginae and still clear.

However, if 1 person can wipe everyone ie. FT traps or Chaotic's cloud phase, obviously they are not going to want to deal with the frustration at a certain point, and will only want players that are confident. The oversight was having a few mechanics in FT that made players feel that way and it wasn't their intention. They overshot and admitted this.

The reason for them thinking it can work is in part due to how guides and raidplans get made and everyone follows them. It works out quite well at getting lots of players to do the easiest extremes or unreals, for example.

[Supersnow845]

Every NA, EU, OCE player, shouting to the heavens: "MAKE CLASSES MORE ENGAGING! GIVE MORE WORLD CONTENT! FREE UP GLAMOUR!"

SE: "Zzz..."

One high-level JP raider: "Make X class easier to make my parses look better! And make it easier to level. Spend all remaining dev time on DDR raids."

SE: "Yes sir, glory to the RFWF adminstration"

I think this is just punishment for getting attached to a game made by an east-asian developer. You've seen the type of gacha to come out of there, their consumer bases just have... different ideas as to what a good game looks like.

Remember that time NA/EU literally had to hunt what post triggered the VPR changes and it was like one JP forum post with 2 upvotes and a ton of comments disagreeing with it