Liveletter "feedback"?

[Rumpelstiltzkin]

Hi everyone,

So after watching another liveletter I decided that I need to give SE a little piece of my mind haha. Anyway, before all liveletters we are asked to post our questions in a thread and they will answer some of them. Now I don't know how many times I have seen a sick amount of votes for some questions just to see the community manager just completely ignore them. I did not even bother checking the thread this time so I don't know if the questions this time were the ones people actually wanted answered the most or if it was simply the way it usually is.

Also maybe the forums are not representative of the playerbase in general and I am in a minority, but even so I believe there could be more balance in how to approach the questions.

I have seen a lot of liveletters, even when I don't subscribe I usually follow them, and I have come to realize they don't cater to people like me in liveletters at all. What I mean is that I don't give a *piiiiip* about hats, minions, housing items, emote poses etc. I care about the gameplay. I want to know about what their plans are for more interesting itemization, ability bloat, horizontal vs vertical progression and so on and so forth. Questions like these so rarely even being recognized is so frustrating to watch. It is as if players like me are just completely ignored for the most part by either the community manager who might think minions are more important or SE because they just don't want to answer other types of questions unless they have to.

The liveletter we just got was E3, now personally when I think of E3 I think about excitment and something a little more special than usual. That is part of what makes E3 so cool. I was looking forward to the liveletter partly because I really am excited for Deepest Dungeon (it looks great), but also because I figured if there was ever a good time for some more interesting information and some cool announcements that might not be at the level of new jobs which are saved for fanfests, it was at E3. Boy was I wrong.

More or less every single question was about housing, minions, emotes, RMT (which we already know they are working to stop) etc. Not a single question was asked that was interesting to me and just from reading the Twitch chat I know I was not alone in thinking that and unless people just stopped asking interesting questions in those threads (like I said I didn't read them this time) I can't for the life of me understand why the focus is so extremely tilted towards one type of player.

I have nothing at all against questions about minions etc, I have nothing against players that enjoy that type of thing and I want SE to answer those questions. It is just that what I would also like to see is a little balance. Please understand that there are some of us out there that really would like other questions answered as well. Even if just a couple. Please try to balance it more between different types of questions.

Lastly, just one thing... I have already learned that SE are experts at announcements of annoucements, but even so I always get my hopes up and yesterday was a good example. If you are at E3 and you claim to have some cool announcements at the end of the stream, again please try to balance those towards your whole playerbase. Plushies and dates for fanfest? I wasn't even expecting a lot because I know most things will come at the fanfests, but that just took the cake in uninteresting information for me. Again, do I mind that is announced? No of course not I know there are a lot of people that get excited about that type of thing, but could you not have give us at least something small about the actual game? It was E3.

[Rawrz]

I can't even find a link for it qq

[Rumpelstiltzkin]

I can't even find a link for it qq

I don't know if the entire thing is up yet, but on youtube you can always check out MrHappys videos about it. It is shorter, but has some thoughts and stuff about what was said. I just searched for ffxiv live letter on youtube. Maybe it will give you some idea of what was said until you can watch the whole version at least.

[Greydor]

TL;DR version:

Balmung controls live letters.

[Vaer]

Live letters are basically advertising for fluff. With fanfest coming up, none of the indepth "expansion" or "new job" questions will be answered until then most likely. Glamour is the easiest to answer since it doesn't affect gameplay and they can make more money off of it so it's a win win for them.

[Belhi]

I think the reason they don't get a lot into gameplay at live letters is they are generally speaking about stuff that is pretty much things they can reliably talk about. Things that are subject to change like gameplay issues aren't things they are going to discuss in detail at a live letter till they are settling on a system and system changes like that tend to happen with expansions rather than patch releases.

The industry in general tends to be pretty quite about talking details on unfinished work. The reason for this is as much the public's fault. Players have a habit of taking anything a dev says as a promise, even when things are still very much up in the air. There is a huge amount of iteration in game design and often things that designers try to do don't work out well in development and as a result have to either undergo substantial change or get scrapped entirely. Players have a habit of considering these broken promises. I think we will see more on gameplay when they feel they are ready to offer some solid reliable information on what they are offering.

[Alberel]

Whilst I understand your frustration OP, the reason they don't talk about the topics that interest you is because there isn't really anything to say on those topics. Itemization, ability bloat, new progression systems, etc. These are all things they have indicated zero plans for changing. It's likely if they addressed those questions it would just be a string of 'we have no plans for that' over and over which wouldn't make for interesting viewing...

Something else to note, however, is that all of the topics you highlighted are the kinds of things you'll see in expansions, not content patches. With that in mind, if they do have plans to address any of those things you won't be hearing anything at all on it until the new expansion gets announced.

[Unaki]

Whilst I understand your frustration OP, the reason they don't talk about the topics that interest you is because there isn't really anything to say on those topics. Itemization, ability bloat, new progression systems, etc. These are all things they have indicated zero plans for changing. It's likely if they addressed those questions it would just be a string of 'we have no plans for that' over and over which wouldn't make for interesting viewing...

No, Yoshida has explicitly stated when asked several Live Letters ago that he knows that these things are something that will need to be addressed eventually. Its not that they can't or won't do it, its that its not feasible to do when the game is operating on a severely limited platform that is holding it back. He already told us yesterday that inventory and armory chest space expansions will be there in 4.0 and this is more than enough evidence that they are going to drop PS3 support in 4.0.

[Phireblast]

I became a little irked when they asked about Slepnir and emphasized the question as "something we've been hearing at the start of 3.0". What about things we've been asking since 2.0 such as cooldown resets upon wiping?

[seekified]

Yeah, dropping PS3 support and upgrading the hardware and/or software that their servers run on is likely going to help a lot with many of the game's commonly cited problems. This is all likely happening for 4.0 though, and they'll want to do a proper grandiose reveal of all the things that the next expansion will give us, instead of trickle things out over six months. They want a condensed hypebomb, essentially.