Thread: A Letter to The Producer

Hello, I'd like to first say that I thank the Development team for all of your hard work. I enjoy the game a lot and greatly appreciate the hard work everyone on the team does to keep the players happy. It's a difficult job, but I truly believe you can do it.

A little back story on my history with FFXIV to fully understand my perspective. I tried the game for the first time on a relative's computer in the version 1.0 Beta and I was absolutely stunned by how beautiful the game was and how well done the animations were. After creating my character and picking my class and starting city, I was off right away with a handful of leve quests and took off out of the gates of Limsa Lominsa and went onto try some combat and even with how blown away I was with fascination with the game, for reasons you know very well, I stopped after an hour or so. Fast forward nearly a year later, I heard about the efforts to rebuild the game and as a gamer I found that to be quite inspiring. My interest was sparked and from there you had my support. Eventually I had forgotten all other games and I became a very passionate XIV player even playing nearly every day up until the end of 1.0 and I feel that the game even became a part of who I am, in a way.

Despite my initial distaste (mainly technical difficulties early on), I found my passion again with 2.0 and I still play nearly every day. With that said, my passion is in severe decline with the recent patches because I feel that the players are not being fully listened to. Though I do feel as though you do try to listen to us but go about it in a way that frustrates the players, or as you called them "Citizens".

The Zodiac Quest
This is where I have many problems. The Relic weapons themselves and the quest to get them are meant to be accessible content that caters to casual players and I'm fine with that. In the original quest, it was a great formula. Defeat trials and get my weapon then spend currency to upgrade it. But then came the second portion, Atma.
Although the formula was still "Defeat trials to obtain then spend currency to upgrade", it was done in a bad way. I went from defeating trials to defeating Fates, by no means any sort of challenge. And considering that the team had complied to a request to not include the FATE system in any more events, I felt betrayed. My thoughts were "They said they wouldn't rely so much on Fates for this, but they turn around and rely on it for that instead! Is this some sort of joke?". You listened to us, but you didn't at the same time.
The Animus portion was the new spend currency to upgrade portion to me. I really looked forward to doing it and went in with the bias that it would be fun. But when I got to it, I realized a majority of my time completing my books was just waiting for a FATE to complete it. I am not an impatient person by any means, but I play a video game to play, not to wait and do nothing. It was an outright slap to the face to me to be told "If you want this, you have to stand around and do nothing". I was greatly let down by this, despite the rest of the "upgrade" being so fun to complete.
Novus however, was a shining beacon of how to do things right. Defeat trial to obtain, spend currency to upgrade. We completed Mysterious Maps, which was building on already loved content (maps) to obtain Alexantrite which we then had to spend currency to buy Materia to upgrade. It took a long time, but we actually played the game to do it and didn't have to do any FATE content. But despite this, the stigma is so strong, at least in the NA community, that what I hear said most about those who complete a Novus is "They must really hate themselves to complete that quest" and many people who have even just attempted this quest see it as borderline self punishment.
So my question on this is, are you content with how your citizens view this? If the answer appears to be "Yes we are, even though you are not", then pride in FFXIV would be greatly hurt.

The Hunt
I have never been as excited for anything else in FFXIV since the release of 2.0! The anticipation for this was overwhelming to me. But, you gave us what we asked for in a thoughtless manner. The player base asked for even more open world content and "Notorious Monsters" from FFXI. The goal, I imagine was to help boost player's ilevel to prepare players for the upcoming 2.4 patch and make i110 armor and weapons accessible to everyone. This to me is fine, and the natural progression of the team's design philosophy and I understand this. But in practice it failed to be what was imagined. Even the dailies are distasteful due waiting for Fates. With a fix on the horizon and several threads with many takes on this currently and I will leave it to you to listen to us closely after the patch 2.35 fix.
The question in regards to this would be, are you willing to listen to us when our vision differs from yours? If the answer appears to be "No" and you don't appear to meet us half way, it would hurt my faith in the team.

As far as the game itself goes, those examples will be enough to point out where I see wrongs. However, the philosophy has changed when 2.0 hit success and I think we lost two very important things.

The Voice of The Player
This is by far the most important thing to me. I feel like the players don't have as much of a voice as we used to. You looked to the players to see why XIV 1.0 failed and asked us what we would do about it. When you took our advice, you took a gamble that the community would know what's best. Your gamble paid off and that greatly helped lead to the success of version 2.0 we all know. Please show us again the faith we showed you and let us have more of a voice that just random feedback. Player polls were a good tool that has been thrown away and us players as a resource are too valuable to just toss out like that. So I ask of you, please make the gamble again because the odds are in your favor.

Transparency
I really don't understand why this has gone away. I used to know what was planned for XIV and the directions you were taking me. Now it feels like I have a blindfold and can't help the feeling you don't want me to know where the destination is. Roadmaps, as simple as they were, were an important communication tool with the players. Yes, the roadmaps were notoriously late, but it was better than nothing at all. On top of that, I knew the changes you wanted to make. I don't know beyond in game cliff hangers and speculation what's coming next anymore besides the hints at what's around the corner. I also feel that you can benefit in showing us how things will work more clearly before release so you can avoid some of these player backlashes such as Atma or Hunts. You say you have years ahead planned if my memory serves me correct. So please, show us your plans like you once did.

There are more things I would like to touch on, but I feel that I have pointed out my main issues with what's been said. Myself and many other players like me care about the success of this game and your players want to continue to enjoy Eorzea so please, make us feel like you care as much as we do again.

Sincerely,
Amy Neudaiz

Originally Posted by Renik

How is running the same dungeons over and over more fun than farming atmas? for my it's the same repetitiveness, at least the atma part can be done at your own pace w/o being locked for 20 min in an instance.

For the rest, i agree even though a 50% of your post can be tldr'd as "i hate fates", there nothing wrong about hating them, the fate system was implemented on the worst way possible just like hunts.

Only a few lines were about Fates. But even then, that I dislike them was not the complaint.

Originally Posted by Cutie_McSnuggles

Yoshi has actually talked about this a few times somewhat unofficially. But basically he got tired of people calling him a lair if something didn't come out exactly when he said it would or exactly the way it was first described. Plans change and bugs crop up, and as much as the dev team would like to keep us in the loop they also don't want us to feel lied to if for some reason or another something doesn't happen when they planned for it to happen.

I do vaguely recall that statement, however we still could benefit from more transparency. A general direction as opposed to having a blindfold and given small hints would be a vast improvement and we wouldn't feel "lied to" about specifics.

I like the thought you put behind this and agree with almost everything you have to say.

Originally Posted by AmyNeudaiz

Transparency
I really don't understand why this has gone away. I used to know what was planned for XIV and the directions you were taking me. Now it feels like I have a blindfold and can't help the feeling you don't want me to know where the destination is. Roadmaps, as simple as they were, were an important communication tool with the players. Yes, the roadmaps were notoriously late, but it was better than nothing at all. On top of that, I knew the changes you wanted to make. I don't know beyond in game cliff hangers and speculation what's coming next anymore besides the hints at what's around the corner. I also feel that you can benefit in showing us how things will work more clearly before release so you can avoid some of these player backlashes such as Atma or Hunts. You say you have years ahead planned if my memory serves me correct. So please, show us your plans like you once did.

Yoshi has actually talked about this a few times somewhat unofficially. But basically he got tired of people calling him a lair if something didn't come out exactly when he said it would or exactly the way it was first described. Plans change and bugs crop up, and as much as the dev team would like to keep us in the loop they also don't want us to feel lied to if for some reason or another something doesn't happen when they planned for it to happen.

Originally Posted by Renik

50% of your post can be tldr'd as "i hate fates"

Actually she never said "I hate FATEs." What she said was, "I hate waiting on FATEs" Which I can totally agree with. I think doing FATEs is fun when I happen to run across them, but having to sit there and wait for a specific FATE is not fun.