Are the developers of XIV out of touch?

[Remedi]

I agree. I like having something other than a weapon drop. Back in ARR the moogle necks were BiS, and the ring from Ramuh. For anyone who raids, Tsukuyomi weapons are dead on arrival. Even for non raiders, the upgrade item for the tome weapon will be released in 24man soon.

Not to mention they kinda revealed that the new eureka weapon and probably HoH will be tsukuyomi level (They said they staggered those because ppl wouldn't run tsukuyomi).

Frankly the reward structure of Ramuh was very good, though it should be said that it was a ilvl 100 ring and then buffed to ilvl 110 after ppl complaint that the reward was MEH compared to the difficulty, but still it gave a much better variety of choice for rings at that ilvl.
As such I believe that while weapons should still be a reward, they should think about returning to accessories drop in the odd patches

[Hamada]

Yes they are

SE is a small indie company, adjust your expectations accordingly.

Really does feel that way and I am sure there are indie games more responsive to the community. Like for 4.3? I think it was? People where trying to state complaints they have with the GM system and the general "3 strikes you are perma banned no matter what the 3 strikes are" and all they did was explain the 3 strike rules? while making weak attempts to show they will be doing more to combat botting, while all balmungs endgame gather botters are still here botting..I get more meaningful development feedback on a mobile game:

https://forum.supercell.com/showthre...1#post11698643

To me this community manager really understands what people say about things and how it impacted some of the changes, never had that feeling for XIV. We say one thing, FFXIV dev team does what they want, like doing the greed only despite huge amount of complaints about it, same with taking chat out of feast and other changes that made no sense. I know they reversed the greed thing later but why did it had to go that far?

[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.

[Mikhaill]

Yeah, I'm not going to sit here for the next 10 years and having
Ultima The 10th Unlimited TRIAL. They are so scared to move forward
because of 1.0's failure that they are in a Safe Space Limbo.
Nothing else they can do...I'm sure the things that people want cannot
be done with how the core of the game is. I'm one of those people tbh.
And the things that CAN be helped, someone somewhere has miscommunicated
with the team or again, "we can't because limitations". I'm still trying to find out
how we can't have more inventory space because limitations but magically can with purchasable retainers.

There's one thing where hardware is legit limiting things but it's another
when you Godang lie to us. You might as well tell us "you don't feel like it".

[polyphonica]

And the things that CAN be helped, someone somewhere has miscommunicated
with the team or again, "we can't because limitations". I'm still trying to find out
how we can't have more inventory space because limitations but magically can with purchasable retainers.

[...]

There's one thing where hardware is legit limiting things but it's another
when you Godang lie to us. You might as well tell us "you don't feel like it".

For this one, they actually said from the get-go that they could increase retainers, but it's the active inventory (that gets synced with the server constantly, including when you're in instances) that can't increase further. All the other things they've done since then, like Saddlebag and Glamour Plates, were done in a different way to bypass this limitation. It was basically their answer to the problem of not being able to expand active inventory further. (There was actually a detailed post by one of the lead engineers that explained this.)

The problem is, as you say though, unclear communication (which isn't helped by imperfect translation). They gave an answer about one specific thing, but it got interpreted as an answer about a very broad thing... and then when they come up with a different solution to address the broader problem, it's perceived as a lie. The more detailed/nuanced communications that fully explain it are either not translated or not noticed. This same pattern has repeated a number of times in the past and definitely makes things worse.

[Hamada]

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?

My problem with that viewpoint is something I shown earlier:

https://youtu.be/0_7u0z9cIZI

You got any idea how many people play this game? esp compared to ffxiv? There is a huge range of of their ranking system. Picture a rank point system about 5500 max and 0 is the smallest, within 100 points, say you have 2200, you hit that button to be matched with someone, within above or below 100 points you are instantly matched with someone. How can something appeal to that wide range of people, and still find time for the community manager to sit there for 10 minutes, explaining the changes, showing that he understands what people want and complain about (esp on the remark on the eagle cannon to golems) When you see someone talk in that way, it really shows they listen to people.

When it comes to yoshi-p it sounds like he thinks he knows what people want, but doesn't. Take the male bunny thing. They could approached this differently, they could gone slow and just did the bunny ears, get ideas over a "male version" of the suit. But no there was a miscommunication and thought everyone wanted this copy/paste solution... I mean how out of touch can you be?

Yeah, I'm not going to sit here for the next 10 years and having
Ultima The 10th Unlimited TRIAL. They are so scared to move forward
because of 1.0's failure that they are in a Safe Space Limbo.
Nothing else they can do...I'm sure the things that people want cannot
be done with how the core of the game is. I'm one of those people tbh.
And the things that CAN be helped, someone somewhere has miscommunicated
with the team or again, "we can't because limitations". I'm still trying to find out
how we can't have more inventory space because limitations but magically can with purchasable retainers.

There's one thing where hardware is legit limiting things but it's another
when you Godang lie to us. You might as well tell us "you don't feel like it".

Yeah charge people more money for something a sub should be paying for. The retainer situation is ridiculous.

[BreyVoreas93]

I would have to agree they are out of touch. Ive played since beta and honestly I am tiring of the same formula each patch. They are afraid to take risks on content, it’s a bit ridiculous that we have to wait 1-2 months after a patch (4.3) to get Heaven in High and the Eureka Pagos...The communication is never very good either, how bout a road map for content? What happened to blitz all? What happened to Ishgard housing?? At this rate I can’t inagine people will wait around doing the same things in the game hoping for something else...guess we will see.

[polyphonica]

How can something appeal to that wide range of people, and still find time for the community manager to sit there for 10 minutes, explaining the changes, showing that he understands what people want and complain about (esp on the remark on the eagle cannon to golems) When you see someone talk in that way, it really shows they listen to people.

Honestly, part of this is just cultural and due to the language barrier. A lot of the long explanations that are provided (for example, during Patch Note readings, in interviews, staff server visits, and the like) are in Japanese and not officially translated. Sometimes when they are officially translated (like Live Letters), they'll summarize a 5-minute explanation and try to "cover the main points" so most of the nuance and detail is lost. And then there are times when the translation ends up missing or slightly misinterpreting the original point (due to lacking technical background or whatever), or a fan translation makes a mistake but sticks in everyone's mind. I'm not trying to say this is a "valid excuse" for the miscommunications that occur; Square Enix is a big company and they need to figure it out. But, it's definitely a factor that creates a larger perceived barrier among English players when they compare to English developers.

[Marxam]

I would have to agree they are out of touch. Ive played since beta and honestly I am tiring of the same formula each patch. They are afraid to take risks on content, it’s a bit ridiculous that we have to wait 1-2 months after a patch (4.3) to get Heaven in High and the Eureka Pagos...The communication is never very good either, how bout a road map for content? What happened to blitz all? What happened to Ishgard housing?? At this rate I can’t inagine people will wait around doing the same things in the game hoping for something else...guess we will see.

Well they went from designing an engaging game to a watered-down theme park. I refuse to believe that Yoshi P or really any legacy game developer is out of touch but rather they are fully aware of their situation and as a business create products to entice excessive purchases from players. Things like dyes, exclusive mounts, retainers, etc. are only a few examples. I've been playing since 2.0 beta and what sold me on the game at the time was that it was fun engaging and I felt like progress actually mattered. Things like Coil or relics and just the general difficulty of the game in the vanilla form was exciting. I remember having to stop outside of demon wall just to formulate a plan of attack. That sense of teamwork is non-existent outside of savage raids which makes this game feel so empty now. No sense of achievement because there was no adversity to overcome and that's what killed it for me.

However I'm already sobering up to the fact that I feel like SE is set on turning FFXIV from a cash cow to a cash farm and any semblance of player experience is almost out the door. It's far more obvious now with patches feeling more and more empty, content spaced out even farther within patches, and adding a dye option to gear introduced in a previous patch which should have been done in the first place. The latter is what irks me the most since adding the ability to dye is now considered mandatory among the playerbase given how huge glamours are. I'm always pissed to get a sweet looking gear only to find out it can't be dyed but a few patches later it can be.

I digress, but I personally don't think that the FFXIV team is out of touch but rather are fully aware of what they are doing and we are all just addicted to it. Once my 3 months are up (which I sorely regret buying) I will have to seriously consider what to do with this game I used to enjoy playing.

[Remedi]

Though it's worth noticing that 2.0 release was something that would've been panned by players and citics were it any other game, half of 2.1 content was content that was supposed to come with release and that was pushed back for several reasons.

I wouldn't consider the release of 2.0 enticing or very fun tbh, if it wasn't for wow having that nice idea of wod I might've stopped playing ffxiv