The moment that made me reconsider FFXIV

[GenericMagus]

It was back in Patch 4.3, during the Rising event, celebrating the 5 year anniversary of the game. A massive milestone in an MMO that risen from the ashes, and survived this long with a strong and growing fanbase. However, the moment that changed my perspective of the game forever happened.

It was hard to access the content. In order to do the Rising event, you had to wait, for hours on end, of pure waiting, in order to enter a watered down, FATE driven re-enactment of the hours before the Calamity that was over in 10 mins. I waited 16 hours in total, over 2 days (counting of day of release) in order to get in. Just sitting outside Ul'dah, and hearing about how it's difficult to get in, how the NPC is random or on a set timer. It appeared like it was broken, but was intentionally programmed that way, and working as intended. When the NPC despawns as well that made me cross. Time locked event, not everyone can access, and it all feels cheap, slapped together and barely able to function. In all the years of playing FFXIV, this changed my outlook on the game.

4.3 is in my opinion the worst patch of the entire MMO in my eyes. Recycled content, grind after grind, RNG upon RNG, risking injury to make process and the 5 year anniversary event that Yoshi in-game thanked us for staying with that totally made the anniversary a joke.

With my beloved job BLU revealed as Limited, and literally thrown into the game to die, SE earned my disdain for them.

I feel Yoshi is out of touch with his own community, saying how great the game is and the content he makes yet it feels he ignores feedback, all content is starting to feel the same, just with different rules and the only unique stuff is in Gold Saucer (Lords of Verminion is far better than Eureka).

Every content that has been released has needed a teething period, where we had to struggle and SE had to nerf the grind and buff certain aspects to make it more tolerable. The content we got feels a lot like carbon-copy of HW content, yet somehow feels more lazy and worse. Why can't SE make fun content more often on release that doesn't need a literal fight to make it far more accessible and have the potential to be long lasting instead of a 2 week life span if it doesn't have RNG or a massive grind/pay wall?

[GenericMagus]

Tl:dr. 4.3 Rising event is the travesty that makes me question SE in the present day, and how the dev team feels underfunded, understaffed, unable to create original content and churns out RNG and grinds at every single point in the game, bad design choices everywhere and not listening to feedback and how content is being released under a "launch now, patch later" attitude that SE themselves promised to not do.

[Astarotha]

good news then, squeenix just reshuffled their entire corporate structure to streamline a lot of corporate decisionmaking and yoship is on the board able to put forward for more staff to ease dev burden, however your feedback is so nebulous and the playerbase so unfocused on EXACTLY what would SPECIFICALLY make ff14 better that doing all of it would be literally impossible due to the many contradictions this inevitably brings up, and dont forget that this last year a huge portion of the team has been hard at work on shadowbringers, so im not at all surprised the end of expansion content has been pared back so the people hard at work making the game dont work themselves to death

my advice would be find a specific thing you think would make the game better, create a plan based around what it would take in the art/modelling/programming/database entry/writing steps that any game dev must go through to add anything to a game, and then put forth that suggestion showing youve taken into account on at least a macro level the roadblocks that may prevent said suggestion from being implemented

for example they brought up in an interview they have tried to implement mirrored hairstyles, but it turned out to be way more difficult than anticipated, now we dont know if the roadblock was due to legacy code, the way the hairstyles are modelled and interact with other systems (like the physics are done a certain way, and mirroring them breaks that system entirely since its receiving negative axis inputs), there may be no code in the game that allows for a mirror tool to be inserted (which means theyd have to make the code to insert the tool), it could be they dont have say 100 grand laying around to hire a team of modellers AND get them up to speed on the engine enough to model a mirrored version of each hairstyle from scratch (this might even be the cheaper option than coding in a mirror option that does it for you, it does however double the amount of work to make each new hairstyle going forward), and often we as gamers only ever see this seemingly insignificant checkbox when picking a hairstyle that says [_] Mirror Hairstyle and think "oh just add that option like this other game, problem solved" and it is rarely that easy

[Reap00]

Can I have your stuff?! I always wanted to say that in a forum. Thanks for giving me the PERFECT opportunity!

[AnnaRosa]

Can I have your stuff?! I always wanted to say that in a forum. Thanks for giving me the PERFECT opportunity!

Exactly can sense the sarcasm feeling always wanted to type on forum "if you leaving send postcards" or "don't forget to hit the door behind you".

[Seraphor]

I didn't even know there was this "Rising" event.

So surely I should be even more disappointed than you right? I mean I've experienced less content...

Nope, not feeling it.

[GenericMagus]

First off, this isn't a "I'm quitting" thread, but a dislike of what has happened.

Also, this event https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...18/The_Rising/

This one that had a ton of negativity but I guess people just can't seem to remember or have short term memory.

While I am not a game designer or have a place in SE outside of being a consumer, I can still criticize the product that they put out, such as recently like FFXV.

To me it's apparent that SE is just looking at charts and the absolute broadest methods of collecting "useful data" that ends in lackluster design and a feeling of disconnection.

If the community is so widespread on opinion, and not even the official forums is good enough on feedback, then perhaps SE should have test servers then, or perhaps even opinion polls collected in game. Get actual feedback from people, better communication with the audience and be in touch more. If SE wants feedback, then they should go and actually talk to the audience. If you're a PvPer, you would remember the frustration even getting a mod to talk in the official forums.

Yes I am aware of corporate proceesings and how there's a lot of bureacracy and stopgates, but that doesn't justify poor content.

Btw, the sarcasm fails.

[linay]

In order to do the Rising event, you had to wait, for hours on end, of pure waiting

Uhm, I'm sorry for having to tell you this, but you're playing the game incorrectly. It's an event that lasted for days, and so you do other things in game or outside of the game instead of just waiting for hours. I didn't even think about the event. I was doing something and passed by Uldah and saw the npc was up and went in and completed it without any wait.

Also, grind and RNG could be much worse than what it is in the game, and much of it could be alleviated if you really need it by running with friends, but even going solo it isn't bad at all in my opinion compared to what it could be.

[Kalise]

In regards to "Nebulous" feedback...

You know what Blizzard have done fairly recently?

They sent out questionnaires to players. Both players who've logged in recently and players whom have not logged in for a while.

Asking things like their opinions on various pieces of content, their priorities in terms of content (I.e. Rank in order of preference this list of activities) and in the case of the latter portion of players they literally asked "What would make you come back?"

Now, this ended up getting laughed at, partially because the way it happened was it was right after everyone saw their stocks drop massively so it came off as a "Y u no liek gaems?" type thing, in addition, some of them also had a heavy focus on "How much time/money do you spend watching the e-sports of this game?" right after they had just axed the pro scene in HotS...

However, this sort of thing isn't inherently negative.

It can simply be just a good way of gauging the success of new attempts at content as well as getting an idea of where to try adding something new.

For example, Eureka is a great place they can ask people about. Questions like:

* Did you enjoy it?

* What did/didn't you enjoy about it?

* If you could make some changes to it, what would they be?

* How did you feel about the Relic weapon being obtained there?

* How many Relic weapons did you complete?

* What did you feel about the difficulty?

* Did you like the FATEs? Why?

* How did you feel about Logograms?

* How did you feel about Baldesion Armoury?

This is just some of the questions they could ask about a single piece of content.

They could ask similar things about other content. Such as Dungeons, Raids, Beast Tribes, Crafting, Gathering, Gold Saucer, MSQ, FATEs, Hunts, Trials, Hildibrand, Housing, Character customisation, Male Viera/Female Hrothgar etc.

Just pop a bunch of questions into a questionnaire. Send them out to players via email. Collect the responses, get people to translate them and then let Yoshida read through peoples responses (Of course, trim things down so it's not a massive pile of things to read through)

Get direct feedback beyond mere "Numbers" and "Charts" - Easily collated into regional preferences and relevant to specific topics.

While leaving the "Nebulous" ideas and thoughts to the Forums/Reddit where people can put together threads about new content they might like to see.

[Shougun]

They sent out questionnaires to players.

I love those lol. Well at least for companies that are interesting to me (SE would count) or have done something for me. Some companies actually really value those, depending on how you treat the CS and respond to the non-anonymous ones sometimes (it seems) you'll be treated well. Like Comcast seems to actually want to keep me lol "hey I noticed you increased my bill, can we not do that? Yes sir, it's back to the same rate it has been for the last 6 years, don't forget to call in a few months to extend your free hd cable box for the remainder of the contract have a good day!". Nielsen (iirc the name right) sends me a survey like once a month with ~$5-10 in them and when I fill them out (usually one page) they send $10-20 or a bigger survey with a larger pre-pay and fill out reward lol.

SE would have to put a word limit though; otherwise, some of us might be tempted to respond to them in the depth of short stories XD.

As for @OP, there is nothing wrong with taking a break if it's draining you. I don't think Yoshi-P is out of touch per say, because there are hundreds of thousands to touch (lol), so he's bound to disappoint someone based on the sheer number of people. There are too many people to always make everyone happy, just has to try his best to make as many as possible pleased and attentive to many diverse needs.. which I can imagine is really hard. I would like to see some more interaction, but I get that takes away from their dev time and stresses people out (we all can be a bit awful, self included haha).

Although I do think they read feedback and respond from personal experience (or happenstance depending on how you look at it), so I think just being polite yet constructive is well enough and if you want or don't like a few things/directions it can be worth addressing those items specifically.

Some bigger examples of things I felt were listened to like way way back when I had asked for a change to materia when it used to blow up your whole gear and have no stat limits (causing melded gear to be both frustrating and weirder in balance), I had described gpose system in the 1.0 to 2.0 era (to the detail of filters, camera angle, and emote control), a small example was Paladin getting a winged defensive skill that players hide behind you for shelter, or asking for summoner to get more grandiose spells and egi (in one of my posts I had described a battery mechanic of using aethertrail to fill up your power to call a larger egi primal like bahamut).

Certainly all of those could have been circumstance though (already planned, or asked by others but I didn't know- like with the other language forums). On that I have quite a few other examples (lots of QoL/other random bits). So its hard for me to feel like they don't listen at all, but maybe I've just wrote so much I've blinded myself lol - still I feel like they listen.