Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Mahrze]

Of course this is only my opinion. /shrug

This is what it always boils down to, to be brutally honest.

[Galaktica]

Hot take: Yes and No.

Sure, we don't get everything we ask for, but there's enough shit added to this game that it's obvious they're listening loud and clear. We got a bunch of cutesy hairstyles and glamour every now and then. We're getting Cloud's ugly ass bike. ffs, they're even entertaining the idea of adding Viera to the game. It's clear they're not above adding anything the community begs for if it's possible.

[Vhailor]

Hot take: Yes and No.

Sure, we don't get everything we ask for, but there's enough shit added to this game that it's obvious they're listening loud and clear. We got a bunch of cutesy hairstyles and glamour every now and then. We're getting Cloud's ugly ass bike. ffs, they're even entertaining the idea of adding Viera to the game. It's clear they're not above adding anything the community begs for if it's possible.

I think they tend to listen when either (a) the rage reaches a sort of critical mass, or (b) when following through is a relatively trivial matter.

Examples of (a) would be the recent about-face on the Need / Greed changes in 24-man Alliance Raids and the woefully limited housing availability up until this most recent Ward expansion. Examples of (b) would be what you largely described: hairstyles, cutesy Glamours, Cloud's ugly-ass bike, probably Viera when all is said and done (I'll bet significant sums of Gil on Viera being 99% humanoid, just like Au Ra).

Where they don't listen - and where they're clearly out of touch - is in regards to underlying systemic issues (the blandness of content update cycles; RMT; Diadem 3.0 - err, Eureka*; etc.). Here, we get nothing from SE. No real mea culpas, no player surveys, no explanations, no fixes over time. Unfortunately for SE and FFXIV, these areas are quite important. It's hard to say when exactly SE's failure to address them will have consequences, but it'll happen in some form or another. They're poisoning their core fanbase, one small predictable content drip at a time.

[polyphonica]

I think the issue is, when you're making entertainment that targets a more broad/casual market, following a formula doesn't "poison" the well nearly as quickly as people think. Consider all the big gaming franchises that release basically a slightly-different skin of the same game year after year after year to colossal sales, or how Hollywood is focusing on "cinematic universes" that are basically sequel after sequel of very similarly-structured and themed movies. Yeah, obviously, eventually people tire of the formula and move on, and there are some misfires along the way, but how long do they expect this game to last anyway? Are they going to have 5 more years of active content? 10 more years? By that time, how much will the gaming world have changed, and what will the newer younger generation of players want/expect?

It's very easy to make major changes when you have something that's clearly broken, as happened with FFXIV 1.0. But since 2.0, the game has gone from success to success, with 4.0 being the most successful yet. I don't think they're under any delusion they'll be able to keep that up forever, but what's riskier? Sticking with the formula you know that has brought you success so far (knowing it won't work forever and will taper off), or taking things in a different direction that may or may not be as successful but breaks the status quo? I dare say that 95% of companies will choose the former, until there's very clear, undeniable signs that the market has changed (and then they'll follow the market to whatever's next).

All in all, I think the developers feel a great weight of responsibility -- now that they did turn FFXIV around and make it successful -- to not screw it up. And this is leading them to be rather conservative in continuing to follow the "winning formula." It's natural that places like the Forums, Reddit, etc. will tend to attract people who are the most invested in the game and have the strongest opinions for change. They also know full well that they can't please everyone, and that any major change they make disrupts the development cycle and comes with a trade-off. (People act like it's just a matter of throwing more money at the problem, but opportunity cost and the impact on other stable processes are the much bigger issues.)

If anything, I think the flaw -- such that it is -- is that the game will continue to "show its age" as time goes on, and so the number of times they have to explain that they're limited by the underlying engine/servers/code/etc. will keep increasing. People want some sort of sign that they'll invest "whatever it takes" to overcome these limitations, but that comes down to a broader business decision about whether to continue to push FFXIV, or to start work on "FFXVII Online." It may be a few years until we have that answer, and there'll continue to be uncertainty in the meantime.

[KageTokage]

They are extremely out of touch when it comes to certain matters.

Such as them only seeming to realize that people have been using real-time datamining to cheese raid mechanics as of UwU despite that fact that they've been doing it since 2.x and there were complaints about it back then, too.

That might just be because they mostly pay attention to the JP side of things, though.

[Hestzhyen]

I feel like there's a huge communication issue more than anything else.

Like, JP gets nearly all the Live Letters, the walks with Yoshi-P, the teasers and news snippets. We have to wait for a major event like E3 to get anything approaching that level of communication- everything else is up to fans or waiting a few weeks for what they feel like giving us. That's awful. It's most obvious when we report stuff like the Ungarmax exploit and there's streams, video proof, and personal reports being submitted in English and SE doesn't respond until JP reports it too. Our botting problem may as well not exist because JP doesn't have the same issues. And so on. I think the devs are responsive to what they know about- wanting Need back, wanting more glamour, wanting more varied activities to do in the game, etc. But as dev cycles are long and we hardly hear ANYTHING on this side until it's announced globally, it's easy to see why western fans feel frustrated.

In general I think the game is not going to change much, for better or worse. We will keep getting what we've always gotten and SE will keep giving it to us with a "take it or leave it" attitude. Nothing will change until a lot of people leave and few newcomers replace them.

[RiyahArp]

I feel like there's a huge communication issue more than anything else.

The thing is though, Japan has a lot more of a media culture when it comes to games. Like they still have at least ten print magazines for them, where I can only think of Game informer in the USA, and its a promotional mag for gamespot now. the usa has only a few websites devoted to it, and less public presence. Not many places in the usa for them to communicate with any more. Remember EGM, official PS magazine, PSM, etc?

[Hestzhyen]

The thing is though, Japan has a lot more of a media culture when it comes to games. Like they still have at least ten print magazines for them, where I can only think of Game informer in the USA, and its a promotional mag for gamespot now. the usa has only a few websites devoted to it, and less public presence. Not many places in the usa for them to communicate with any more. Remember EGM, official PS magazine, PSM, etc?

They have myriad options in other media formats- devs from other games post all the time on reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or heck even their own forums. The death of print media in the US does not mean that Japanese devs are limited in how they communicate to us. SE just... doesn't do it. So our feedback goes unheard and we get feisty and the game stays the same as ever.

[Okamimaru]

It's all good to ask for them to shake things up and take this game another route.... until they actually do it and everyone hates it... I think as many of the ideas yoshi p has gotten from games like WoW, he probably also took note of how changing things can cause damage as well... hell if you change the code from the ground up in 5.0 what happens to all the old arr, hw, sb discs out there? My game isn't a digital copy... so what then? You risk losing alot of players from the potential fallout if things go bad... so yeah they've been doing small things little by little... but changing the game some people find "repetitive and stale" also changes the game other people love as is...

[dark494]

They're certainly out of touch when it comes to RMT but who am I to judge

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...eh_since_2015/