Urgently Change your Approach SE

[BreathlessTao]

I've said this in another thread, but gonna post it here too, because, for cryin' out loud, it is as valid as ever....

Communication between devs and players has been such a cornerstone of FFXIV (lack of it in 1.0 and emphasis of it in ARR), so, really, whatever happened to that? Extensively, why do us, non-Japanese players, have to feel like we're just ignored, time and time again? /Frankly, for whatever reason, I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe they are listening to the feedback on the forums - the Japanese forums, that is, and the Japanese forums only./

Also the issue this /"personal" housing/ managed to fester, on the other hand, is the serious concern we now have: the game is just one year old, and we've already heard server/infrastructure limitations as the main reason way too often for so many things getting limited or outright not implemented at all. Is this how it's gonna be, is this what's down the road for ARR? Because if it is, then we might as well start thinking about designing the coffin and the gravestone of the game.

On another, but somewhat related note, /I would/ ask him if he enjoys gating content. Because for 2+ million players, with a casual nature of the game being emphasised so much (everyone's able to play the way they want, in a tempo they want), we sure as hell are being cornered and put into grindmills over and over and over again.

Hard restrictions:

• gardening - have a high enough ranked FC with deep enough coffers to afford the necessary facilities
• chocobo training - have a high enough ranked FC with deep enough coffers to afford the necessary facilities
• colouring your chocobo - have a high enough ranked FC with deep enough coffers to afford the necessary facilities
• glamour - prisms: lv50 DoH classes
• glamour - gear: lv50 DoH/DoL classes /additionally: why do they even have HQ variants??/
• extreme primals: good luck doing any of them beyond Garuda (and even that is a gamble) with PUGs
• Coil: good luck doing any of it beyond T3 (and even those are a gamble) with PUGs

Gil sinks:

• housing - no comment, personal or FC doesn't even make any difference
• glamour - gear: full HQ AF for your DoL/DoH classes and better have it all overmelded, else don't even think of creating/finding most stuff
• glamour - prisms: the price of those is just insane considering what they do (but probably thanks to the nonsensical requirement to craft them) /Ok, not really a "sink", gil goes from player to player, but considering the fact that we have to spend on it until we have all our DoHs at 50...../
• Novus and basically anything that requires materia - if you take the "easier" route

Time sinks:

• FATEs: whatever it is for, having to camp often hours just to complete one FATE is anything but fun
• glamour - gear: don't want to / can't pay for a certain piece, good luck desynthing items until you finally get it
• relic weapons: anything from atma onwards is a mindless grindfest
• Novus and anything that requires materia - if you take the "cheaper" route

RNG:

• crafting HQ (or even NQ in some cases) items beyond lv50
• gathering HQ (or even NQ in some cases) items beyond lv50
• atma
• all the loot rolls (absolutely no way to influence "luck" even in the slightest amount)
• chocobo colouring (just ridiculous, as if it wasn't gated enough already)
• Novus and anything that requires materia - if you take the "cheaper" route

...obviously these lists aren't complete (only the ones I personally know/care about), and are, individually, not long either. But if you consider all of them together, a generic casual player will have a hard time deciding which one to spend their limited time on to work for (and that's considering they aren't locked out of content by any of the hard restrictions). And I don't think it takes a genius to see that, perhaps, not everyone wants to spend their every online minute just throwing themselves at one of these contents. I also agree that some of these are perfectly fine as they are (a rookie lv50 shouldn't be able to complete T9 blindfolded); but most of them are just arbitrary gates to content that should be fun, content that should be enjoyed by everybody. And these lists keep growing, it's already alienating people, forcing them into quitting. Which is something they should be concerned about right now, in my opinion, if they don't want an early funeral to ARR.

So, yeah, if I /could/, I'd try to highlight these things to him. To take his mind off "personal housing" prices, because that's what he seems way too hung up on as the primary (and secondary) issue here./ Obviously too much at once and most probably needs some thinking and even then would be too long to reply to. But he should start thinking about it. And when he's done thinking about it, he could perhaps give us answers in a nice long Letter from the Producer.

...because basically this is what "poor implementations" (read: disappointments) usually come down to: arbitrary gating and/or their hardware limitations. And for someone loving this game and being passionate about it, it's worrying as ××××.

[Fornix]

Communication between devs and players has been such a cornerstone of FFXIV (lack of it in 1.0 and emphasis of it in ARR), so, really, whatever happened to that? Extensively, why do us, non-Japanese players, have to feel like we're just ignored, time and time again? /Frankly, for whatever reason, I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe they are listening to the feedback on the forums - the Japanese forums, that is, and the Japanese forums only./

As a European player myself I feel the level of interaction by devs towards us is actually still relatively high. It's more than numerous other MMO's out there and it's certainly greater than what the current biggest competitor had to offer. What people do need to realize though is that their demands and concerns though may simply be concidered as ludicrous and belong in the garbage bin at best.

You yourself set a very good example to that, you state the following: with a casual nature of the game being emphasised so much and then continue with some bogus listing on as to how this would be restricted. But you completely forget that Yoshi, and others, have repeatedly stated that they consider this game like a theme park. With different levels of content for everybody. At no time has it ever been said that all content ought to be accessible by everybody.

You also appear to believe, or at least are most certainly giving that impression, that (a majority of) casual players would be working down this list as they can't choose. For many players though, that's simply not going to be the case. Most will have no issue finding what they like doing and just stick to that. And it's not so much even casual gamers which come and cry about not being able to do all of it on these forums, it are usually the players who want it all with minimal time investment. The same who would followingly start QQ'ing that the game has nothing left to offer them.

Also the issue this /"personal" housing/ managed to fester, on the other hand, is the serious concern we now have: the game is just one year old, and we've already heard server/infrastructure limitations as the main reason way too often for so many things getting limited or outright not implemented at all. Is this how it's gonna be, is this what's down the road for ARR? Because if it is, then we might as well start thinking about designing the coffin and the gravestone of the game.

Server limitations in MMO's are absolutely nothing new. And will also remain a part of the genre forever. It is not a reason to think about designing the coffin and the gravestone for the game. It is a reason to start redesigning certain features on the backend. What people conveniently tend to forget is that that's not a matter of a simple button click. But may be a tedious process which can take months before a method is found which works in a more optimized fashion.

[reality_check]

I've said this in another thread, but gonna post it here too, because, for cryin' out loud, it is as valid as ever....



...because basically this is what "poor implementations" (read: disappointments) usually come down to: arbitrary gating and/or their hardware limitations. And for someone loving this game and being passionate about it, it's worrying as ××××.

It's hard for me to even read dumb replies like this.

1. How can you justify your feeling being ignored? We get PLENTY of updates from the developers. They have very active social media, they're very active on the forums, we get live letters. The LEAD DEVELOPER of the team, within 24 hours of 2.38 going live, replied in ALL languages to your qualms about the housing system. So, in short, if you think you're being "ignored" your standards of developer communication are WAY TOO HIGH.

2. You've complained about gil sinks, RNG, and time sinks as if they're out of place in an MMORPG. Players have absurd standards of what content should be in an MMORPG now a days. MMORPGs are BASED around currency sinks, time sinks and RNG.

Do you honestly think that hardware limitations are something new in MMORPGs? The FFXIV team is just a lot more transparent about where their hardware limitations lie.

Individually, I want to talk about each of your little bullets, (good luck pugging anything beyond garuda extreme? I've gotten EVERY single one of my EX wins in a pug, from Ifrit to Ramuh, I've never had a static anything for Extreme primals), but I give up with players like you. And the development team has too.

[BreathlessTao]

snip

Aye, let's consider it a theme park then. What do we have? Numerous rides and attractions, to almost every one of which at least one of these is true: can't get on it on your own; additional celestial amount of tokens as fees for no real reason; either die on it or not, nobody can tell; has people queued up for by the thousands, with only a few dozens of seats available. You can grow your theme park to gargantuan sizes, if most people will only be able to get on the scattered merry-go-rounds, to gawk at the luckier minorities on other rides, they won't be having fun. Or, you know, yeah, you can forbid people from getting on certain rides, but on what basis would you do that when everyone pays the same entry fee? People don't go to theme parks to see the same one attraction over and over and over again (everyone can have favourites, obviously, that's a different matter); they go to theme parks to get on as many things as possible (and the older visitors, to see the new stuff especially, if at least once).

As for the time investment - for someone who can play 70-100 hours a week, 2-3 hours of "work" (it shouldn't be "work", it should be fun) might seem a minimal time investment; for those who can only be online 30-40 hours, or even less, sorry to say, it's a much bigger chunk of time. And yeah, I agree, hardware limits are nothing new. Which is exactly why it's baffling that we're still getting that as an "explanation" to why this can't be done and why that can't be done either and oh why that other thing is impossible as well. I'm pretty sure the number of beta applicants was / could have been / should have been an indication of things to come. The login-issues plaguing early access and the following few weeks were / could have been / should have been indications of things to come. And so on. Yet, since then, for more than a year now, it still doesn't feel like anything's being done about these issues (we don't know, because they don't tell us anything; they added more servers, that was about it, but it clearly didn't/can't solve everything).

snip

1) Let's be specific: we get plenty of "we did this" and "we're going to do that" from the developers - "updates", indeed. That's not communication; communication is a two-way street. That's just them informing us about what's ahead, it's just reports. (Check the general opinion on instances considering personal houses - from those involved, I'm quite certain the majority would have preferred that instead of what we have now.) As for the lead developer replying within 24hrs in all languages to the housing debacle (ohmahgad!) - they say they monitor the forums for feedback, and with that in mind, if you really believe they didn't know what they were about to do would cause major ××××storms, then you're just unbelievably naive. That reply was just another apology (lost count of how many apologies they had to issue by now - if you communicate, that does not have to happen this often), with no real explanation in it and showing only sign of them being adamant about going the way they want to (re: instances vs wards). Also, it was only a proper reply in the Japanese forum, where it is actually a standalone sticky of its own. Wait, even there it's only a post buried on page 14 of a thread that's currently 73 pages long. As for the other languages, it's not even posted via his account (something I'm sure is not technically impossible).

2) I'm not saying these things have no place in MMORPGs. I'm saying that gating basically every single general fun content behind these is just ridiculous (you really think chocobo dyeing, for example, should be as overcomplicated as it is? or simple glamours, for that matter?).

And I already talked about hardware limitations; as for the transparency... yeah, it's the most transparent thing saying "we're going to implement this", only to get, months later, something like "well we wanted to implement this, but we couldn't because hardware, but hey /hugs for y'all". Indeed.

Also, congrats for your PUG clears. Must have either an immense amount of patience or just immense amount of luck. My experience with PUGs, 9 out of 10 times, is that everyone just expects everybody to know everything, and when the first try is a fail, half of the group just ragequits. But yeah, good for you. /thumbsup

[reality_check]

That's not communication; communication is a two-way street.

There are plenty of examples where the developers have listened to the player feedback.

When players complained about repair costs siphoning their gil, they were adjusted. When players complained that Ramuh was not worth the effort, they boosted the rings to level 110, turning some of the rings into BiS for certain jobs. When players complained about Garuda and Titan HM both dropping level 70 weapons, they adjusted Titan's weapons to level 80. When players complained about Allagan weapons being same item level as Relic +1, they boosted Allagan weapons to level 95. When players complained that Warriors were not good enough tanks for their strategies for certain duties, Warriors became significantly better at tanking.

I honestly don't think you'll be happy and until they completely redesign the whole entire game based on your whims.

[Teryaani]

There are plenty of examples where the developers have listened to the player feedback.

Sure. I'm in the camp that is pretty happy with the dev response most of the time. I do see where some of the complaints are valid and it's important to take SE to task when they slip, especially when you start seeing responses like Yoshi's "unclear" one. If you don't, you end up with Blizzard and nobody wants that.

When it was apparent to the developers that the housing wasn't going to go the way Yoshi had stated it was, that should have been made clear to the player base that the reality on the ground had changed. Players would have been annoyed, but it would have averted a large amount of rage.