Trying to understand the negative posts I keep seeing about the Dev Team

[Vidu]

Before I start let me say that come complaints are obviously totally valid, well thought through and made with an aweful lot of insight.

...however, I want to emphaises the "some" - I believe that a lot of complaints actually stem from people not really understanding the core of something they deemed a problem or not understanding the issue at all.
The recent DDoS-attacks are a prime example: People dont understand how the whole thing works, but they wanna blame SE anyways.

The same goes for quite a few other things aswell though:

- The mogstation, for example - people make a huge fuss about items being added their "instead" of being available ingame, but they dont realise that its not "instead", but completly extra, aka the mogstation-team isnt creating content for the maingame in the first place. So those items arent being taken out of the game, but being created only for the mogstation - sometimes not even for our version, but for the korean/chinese one and being imported into ours. Yet, people act or assume that they're only in for double-dipping and dont realise that those items wouldnt exist without the mogstation in the first place.

- Lack of content - while I consider those claims more valid at times (and feel like I dont have enough to do myself), I often see them from people who only like a very specific type of content that they burn through to quickly. Obviously, if you only want to raid, FFXIV wont keep you busy for long! Those people often overlook the theme-park-aspect of the game and ignore/discard the vast majority of content - again, we've been getting less content, thats true and a valid thing to complain about. But sometimes I feel people forget that they also choose to only do 10% of the offered content.

- People not understand that certain adjustments take more time than they'd like to - while this isnt an excuse for ignoring certain jobs for a whole expansion, sometimes I'm getting the impression that people think everything should be magically fixed to their likings in two weeks and dont realise that system and the like need to be thought through - job balance, housing issues... they cant just "fix" either of that with a quickhotfix.
They think "Oh, this should be so easy to implement, which cant they do that over the weekend!" without realising that thanks to our spaghetti code or other technical reasons it isnt "this easy" to add more options to the character creation screen.

What they can do however and what would probably ease a lot of complaints is to communicate better - with all their mess ups that are Eureka and job balances and housing and choices for prizes/event-items and so on and so on, people are getting the impression that the devs just dont care about their playerbase. So they got more and more frustrated.
I bet Pagos would have been recived better, if the devs actually adressed some Anemos-feedback and explained why they didnt put in things liek Daily Quests or the like.

I believe the bigger issue currently is that even those who present well thought through feedback (and not just another hate-thread) dont recive any decent feedback from the devs, which leads to the impression of them just ignoring their playerbase. And obviously they can do that and take a stance of "Our game, our rules, our vision", but that would need clear communication aswell then...

Bottomline: I think its a combination of poor communication and slow responses on the devs-part and a certain amount of lack of understanding of underlying systems/work and unreasonable requests by uninformed people here on the forums. I'm by no means saying that the later goes for everyone who posts their suggestions here on the forums - but a lot of times I see complaint threads and wanna ask the OP "...did you even really think about this and do you even realise what you're asking for here?"

[SerLuke]

- Lack of content - while I consider those claims more valid at times (and feel like I dont have enough to do myself), I often see them from people who only like a very specific type of content that they burn through to quickly. Obviously, if you only want to raid, FFXIV wont keep you busy for long! Those people often overlook the theme-park-aspect of the game and ignore/discard the vast majority of content - again, we've been getting less content, thats true and a valid thing to complain about. But sometimes I feel people forget that they also choose to only do 10% of the offered content.

That is one complaint I think is valid as well but I don't blame this on the Dev Team I blame it more on the higher ups at SE not devoting adequate staffing/funds to FFXIV.

[Vidu]

That is one complaint I think is valid as well but I don't blame this on the Dev Team I blame it more on the higher ups at SE not devoting adequate staffing/funds to FFXIV.

As I said - I do consider those complaints valid most of the time. Specially now with Stormblood and them cutting back on content for the mess that is Eureka.

However I'm struggling a bit to take them serious if they're coming from someone whos ignoring most of the content alltogether, aka a person who only has one job at level 70, hasnt set foot into any raid, hasnt gotten any primal-mount, no crafting/gathering classes, maybe not even finished one beast tribe... I could continue my list, but I wont because my point is not that you have to raid or farm ex-primals or craft/gather or do whatever if you dont like it. You dont even have to do that to have a right to voice your opinion that you'd like to see more of the content you enjoy. But I always take it with a grain of salt when I see people claiming "there is nothing to do" when infact they would have plenty of stuff to do or achieve, they just dont want to.
...or maybe I'm just jealous of them because I'm at the other end of the scale - did pretty much everything there is. And while I'd like to see more content aswell, I also realise that the devs will never be able to release so much content that it actually keeps everyone busy for the whole duration of a patch-cycle.

They could do better, for sure! And they defintely need more funding!
But at the same time I often feel like people overlook a lot of content they could do aswell.

But the overwhelming majority of stuff in the cash shop are things that were originally available in game

At least I'm under the impression that thats not the stuff that people are complaining about - a few weeks back we got the werewolf-set from last year in the cash shop and I dont recall any heated discussion about that on the forums. At best a "You can now buy this"-info-thread.
On the other hand, mogstation-exclusive items always lead to threads in which people are venting about the cash shop and how those items should be available ingame.
And to an extend I agree with ideas like "We need more stuff to spend achievment points on" or "submarines should be useful and bring back cooler items!" and so on.
But people dont seem to understand that the devs dont develop something like that whale and then pick the option "mogstation" out of a pool containing stuff like subs or achievment points, but rather "either this goes on the mogstation or its not gonna happen at all".

And they're also quick to overlook everything thats being added ingame - one new outfit on the mogstation? Suddenly it doesnt matter anymore that we got two new glamour-sets with the last patch, everything is now PayToWin and cash-only!
I'm not a fan of the mogstation - but I'm also pretty annoyed by people just complaining about it without proper reflection about the whole matter and treating it like the end of the world that you cant get Minfilias hair ingame...

[Maero]

That is one complaint I think is valid as well but I don't blame this on the Dev Team I blame it more on the higher ups at SE not devoting adequate staffing/funds to FFXIV.

That would be because a large portion of the sub money from this game goes to fund other projects SE work on which i do not agree with but it is how business goes i guess

[Jandor]

- The mogstation, for example - people make a huge fuss about items being added their "instead" of being available ingame, but they dont realise that its not "instead", but completly extra, aka the mogstation-team isnt creating content for the maingame in the first place.

But the overwhelming majority of stuff in the cash shop are things that were originally available in game

[Deceptus]

- People not understand that certain adjustments take more time than they'd like to - while this isnt an excuse for ignoring certain jobs for a whole expansion, sometimes I'm getting the impression that people think everything should be magically fixed to their likings in two weeks and dont realise that system and the like need to be thought through - job balance, housing issues... they cant just "fix" either of that with a quickhotfix.

This would be believable if their "fix" for BLM and SAM wasn't a 3% total dps increase by adjusting potencies. That's just numbers.