We need better comunication with the Community team

[SenorPatty]

I figured, but with the rest of this statement, the fact you even said that, seems you agree there is an implied meaning there that one of ffxiv's issue is being underfunded, yes?

I think what Tridus is saying--which is also what I think-is that they had a regular budget, the game was not doing well, SE decided to throw money at the game until PR was fixed and then it went back to regular budget.

So basically, the game's got to get to a pretty bad point public-wise again for SE to throw more money at it. Until then, smooth sailing ahead (for them, not for us lol).

[Tridus]

I think what Tridus is saying--which is also what I think-is that they had a regular budget, the game was not doing well, SE decided to throw money at the game until PR was fixed and then it went back to regular budget.

So basically, the game's got to get to a pretty bad point public-wise again for SE to throw more money at it. Until then, smooth sailing ahead (for them, not for us lol).

Yup. Housing sat as it was forever, which was absurdly under the required capacity. Shirogane happened, and it was still severely under capacity. The outcome that tons of people got nothing wasn't at all a surprise, it was called Shirogane Savage for a reason. The reason was given that they can't add more wards because it requires extra server resources, wards are always running, etc, etc...

Then it turned into a Class III Crapstorm, and suddenly money appeared to increase housing server capacity by 50%. More houses were added due to that than were added with Shirogane itself, when Shirogane was a big, marketed feature and the extra wave of housing was a reaction. They even said during that mess that they were procuring servers for the boost, which isn't free.

So it looks pretty clearly like when the bad PR escalated so much and people were rage quitting, the situation got high enough up the corporate ladder that someone said "here's money, fix this." It worked well enough, it's no longer a PR issue and a lot more people got houses. I don't know that everyone did, but I saw mediums open on Cactaur recently and got one, so it worked out for me.

[Hestzhyen]

Yup. Housing sat as it was forever, which was absurdly under the required capacity. Shirogane happened, and it was still severely under capacity. The outcome that tons of people got nothing wasn't at all a surprise, it was called Shirogane Savage for a reason. The reason was given that they can't add more wards because it requires extra server resources, wards are always running, etc, etc...

Then it turned into a Class III Crapstorm, and suddenly money appeared to increase housing server capacity by 50%. More houses were added due to that than were added with Shirogane itself, when Shirogane was a big, marketed feature and the extra wave of housing was a reaction. They even said during that mess that they were procuring servers for the boost, which isn't free.

So it looks pretty clearly like when the bad PR escalated so much and people were rage quitting, the situation got high enough up the corporate ladder that someone said "here's money, fix this." It worked well enough, it's no longer a PR issue and a lot more people got houses. I don't know that everyone did, but I saw mediums open on Cactaur recently and got one, so it worked out for me.

I have to wonder how much of this is the corporate overlords being unwilling to put more money in and how much is someone not being able to request the money they need. I don't envy my managers- they had to get creative with the numbers, but between negotiating with senior management and presenting the data in the right way, they were granted the funds to start the process of doubling the size of our team (yay!). Who does this for SE at the executive level? How could they not see the simmering rage that was slowly building over years and not immediately think "I need to find the money to nip this in the bud NOW thanks to marketing showing off the houses when we have nowhere near enough capacity"? Did the teams in charge of community monitoring/engagement and Housing IT not communicate the situation? Did someone just hope it would work out somehow and not act? Or did they not know because they have better things to do than listen to us ***** and moan?

These questions are all rhetorical since we'll never know. But the point is that SE seems incapable of acting unless we revolt, and by that point there are probably going to be some heads rolling within the staff. There could be a lot of avoided grief and dismay (like the bunny outfit copy/paste reveal today) if they polled how we felt more often.

Riot randomly selects a small portion of their population after matches to ask them quick, one-question surveys after matches to get data (at least they started doing that shortly before I left). SE can do something similar - a short, targeted survey from a random sample to get a sense of what's going on if they don't want to engage us as a whole.

[Vstarstruck]

Riot randomly selects a small portion of their population after matches to ask them quick, one-question surveys after matches to get data (at least they started doing that shortly before I left). SE can do something similar - a short, targeted survey from a random sample to get a sense of what's going on if they don't want to engage us as a whole.

SE sometimes sends out survey after making a gm call to your email, but I have little confidence they get truly read and passed along.