On a scale of 1 to 5-- Do you feel SE listens to their western players? State why.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

I want everyone to feel welcomed to express their true feelings either positive or negative.

Are you satisfied with SE's communication and implementation of our ideas? Or do you feel they ignore a lot of very important things we suggest?

Do you feel the western players are treated equal to the Japanese players in terms of voicing their concerns? Or do you feel there is bias of any kind towards Japanese players?

I'm uncertain on how I feel about this as of yet, but I would like to create this thread to kind of get an idea of what the western player base feels regarding if they are listened to by SE, ignored, or somewhere in-between.

[Noshpan]

I feel that they listen to the community about as much as any other MMO developer. I am Japanese-illiterate, so I cannot get a feel one way or the other.

Despite flaws, I do enjoy playing this game very much.

[Ametrine]

3. The developers are sure to be inclusive to the Western player base in content in and out of the game however, it is easily seen on the forums here that the JP speaking players get a more direct line to the dev team.

Which makes complete sense as the devs are JP themselves.

I don't really take issue with this, though it is a bummer when great concepts put forward by English speaking fans are unnoticed because of a language barrier.

[Norleas]

Give us 1.0 butts back and they get a 5 :^)

[DeadRiser]

Give us 1.0 butts back and they get a 5 :^)

They could honestly give us many 1.0 things that would make people happy.

[KitingGenbu]

2: mainly because of the language barrier, but the NA forums dont help much making it worth the time to even translate half of these threads. Even if you could read English natively, you don't want to read 5 threads on the same topic on the very first page just because each OP believes they have something so special to share on the issue that it couldn't fit into one thread. Probably why they tend to respond to the JP community at least first before everyone else, since if they have an issue, its usually in one thread.

[Norleas]

They have an english team.

[Nuna]

2: mainly because of the language barrier, but the NA forums dont help much making it worth the time to even translate half of these threads. Even if you could read English natively, you don't want to read 5 threads on the same topic on the very first page just because each OP believes they have something so special to share on the issue that it couldn't fit into one thread. Probably why they tend to respond to the JP community at least first before everyone else, since if they have an issue, its usually in one thread.

Yep, if you go on the jp forums you will see most threads have thousands of replies because they use the same threads for years. While over here they make multiple threads about THE SAME THING. Its like everyone wants an attention trophy over here.

[Kosmos992k]

I'd give SE and Yoshi-P good marks for listening, they have repeatedly demonstrated that they do listen, despite the impatience of people raging that they do not responed immediately.

Coincidentally, today I ran across an interview with Yoshida-san where he talks very specifically about player feedback. The interview was published by PC PowerPlay on July 20, 2016. So it is right on the mark and as up to date as we can get.

Here's the link;
Interview: Final Fantasy XIV's Naoki Yoshida

And here are a few quotes to chew on;

PCPP: How much does player feedback help to shape the updated content for the game?

This is a difficult question to answer as the amount of feedback we incorporate into the game is in no way fixed. However, one particular thing is how we are constantly striving to make the user interface more comfortable and intuitive, so this is one area where feedback is very highly valued and quite a considerable amount of feedback is addressed in each new patch. When we make new content we always make sure to study all the previous feedback we have on things like player responses to the reward balancing on previous content or any proposals for tweaking that players think needs doing, even if the new content in question is completely different to past areas. However, whether individual feedback points are addressed and implemented or not is something we consider very carefully. This is because of the slightly different perspective that the development team has. We tend to be quite strict about what systems go in, as we have to maintain the world of Eorzea going into the future, while many players feedback tends to only consider what would be good in the short term.

and...

PCPP: What’s the process for picking which player feedback items are prioritised over others?

We don’t just look at the feedback we get on the forums but have a dedicated FFXIV community team who also check message boards like Reddit etc. and collate together the voice of the players, then analyse what they are saying and pass on a report to the development team and myself. This team has dedicated regional staff in many locations such as Japan, North America, the U.K, and we also collect feedback from South Korea and China via our operating partner companies in there.

All the feedback is listed up every day and urgent issues will be looked at by the development team when they get together the next morning for their regular meeting. Outside of that framework we also hold a separate discussion based around player feedback every Thursday when the development leads get together for the operations meeting. This is when each individual section makes the decisions as to how the feedback will be addressed and the priorities for what gets seen to first will be set down by myself.

There is more in the interview, so take a look. One thing is clear to me though, all the assumptions that people make about community managers and feedback, or not listening to one community or another are thoroughly de-bunked.

[KokonoeAiyoko]

There is more in the interview, so take a look. One thing is clear to me though, all the assumptions that people make about community managers and feedback, or not listening to one community or another are thoroughly de-bunked.

From reading that it seems as if they look at player feedback as an afterthought. They seem to listen, but this shows more of their "playing it safe" implementation, so if they do end up "listening", the communities desires aren't resonating with them. There is also is no real telling how well our community leaders really do here because you can see very well from the history of these forums that the community leaders kinda cherry pick comments or unimportant things that most people are not concerned with.

I'd say this doesn't really debunk anyone's concerns.