Normalize criticism

[kaynide]

An important part of civil discourse is for both sides to remain objective. People often get very defensive if their ideas are not accepted by others, which is simply not helpful.

Moreover, as some others said, suggestions on tweaks or adjustments are great, but ..and how to say this.. some suggestions come from an amateur(?) prospective that quickly gets hate.


Amateur might not be the right word... I guess what I mean is some suggestions are made without knowledge or an understanding of how the game itself works or how the devs intend the game to work. While there is nothing wrong with such a suggestion, it can feel ignorant and gets criticism/bashing for that.

[Caurcas]

Civil discourse gets thrown out the moment emotion enters the arguments. Emotions run wild on these forums.

[Shougun]

Definitely one of my pet peeves when I see feedback shutdown. A recent example might be necro / dark job desires, where I often saw people go into threads and tell the OP it's not possible or never going to happen- and certainly "literally necromancer" is unlikely to happen, I agree, but rather than allow the person to describe what about necromancer or what about a dark job attracted them they were often just told "n o". That just being of many examples where some players had determined for SE what SE could and couldn't do and ended up being off the mark. In terms of quality feedback it's far more valuable for SE to know what people want even if SE has no intention to do exactly what is said, especially since that because in the event they like feedback there is still a high chance they're going to be 'inspired' by it rather than directly copy paste it. Like people will often play accountant on the forum to say something can't be done because of budget, that they somehow know what Yoshida has calculated and allocated for.

SE knows what's going to absolutely murder the lore, SE knows what it can and can't do with it's resources, SE doesn't need people being overly active on that side of the fence. I would add there is a difference from "n o" / "can't happen" to "that's unlikely to happen because "xyz"", and even better "that's probably not going to happen but these ideas very like what you wanted I think could, what do you think?" - I really like when I see people help better organize and foster growth and or try to understand / clarify a concept, a lot of people do this, so I'm not narrowing it down to just one person only, but I've seen "Itme" do it a lot so I wanted to give them a shout out for that effort.

Unrelated to shut down and so I don't want to misconstrue it under shutting down, and so is valid, is just expressing desires different than the person (like if someone said make ultimate unsync able and have echo, another saying "please no!" is not shutting down as much as expressing counter desires, as our desires naturally can impact others). There is definitely nuisance there, and I've seen many kind individuals go through all of those different shades- so it's not like "you're a bad person if you did x" but.. really gets my metaphorical hair on end to see certain conversations hit by some of the worst variants of sticky conversation slag for reasons that are, imo, effectively either meaningless or not for them to decide in the slightest (often relates to players speaking on SE's behalf, specifically for things they've no ability to reference, bit different if they're like "here's an interview that literally says no dating your moogles"). . Seems like an anthesis action to the purpose of the forums (an opportunity for SE to have insight in the mind of the players).

Feedback, imo, is the holy grail purpose of the forums. Must protect the feedback! lol. With some shifts depending on specific areas, like new player help or lore forum.

I would add I think most people, most of the time in the forums, do well, while I might say this is a pet peeve I don't feel it happens all that often, of course with our own special moments as people (sometimes there's just a bad day for a person), and in general this is one of the better places I think for feedback. I've seen WoW forums, not that I visit often, and they just kind of scare me lol. Reddit has a lot of neat features but in terms of discussion and feedback I've always put it a bit low, the added element of downvoting empowers a lot of flavor of the moment wild swings and general negative behavior.

Unfortunately for the devs ideas and negative feedback will be more common, as nature of people- people don't really comment frequently on what's going well, so that's a bit sad. Definitely don't forget to comment on things you liked lol.

[Radacci]

Take it as a "just unsub then" if you want but it's really just a reality check. There's a bunch of common complaints that are just not going to be "fixed." Either get used to it or find a game that fits what you're actually looking for.

Anyway, another thing to keep in mind for criticism is to actually provide some sort of realistic solution, don't just complain for the sake of complaining. And no, just because some modder did it so the devs can do it isn't a realistic solution.

It's not mutually exclusive, you can be bothered by some aspect, while still enjoying other aspect of the game. If I want to play XIV, i don't want to get told to go play something else because this or that bothers me.
Your 2 paragraphs there kind of contradict each other though

I ran through it a week or so ago. I've been popping the antidote since 2014 -- you put it on your bar and click once.

Never found a use for Ether or any of the other early 'potions', though. Seems like the mechanics that required them just don't matter.

Ya that's my issue with it, they don't really serve much use.
The problem with potions is they don't even provide much healing, then it's further nerfed by a % value.

Civil discourse gets thrown out the moment emotion enters the arguments. Emotions run wild on these forums.

Ya, i have been a really emotional person myself, still am a bit in some context.
The only thing it gave me, is depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and put me dangerously close to thoughts of suicide, so i'm trying to kill off such reactions.
Anyway, I'm aspie myself, so i'm not trying to be judgmental about it, but i think FF community is comprised in big part of autistic ppl, as well as ADHD etc. I think such ppl like things that doesn't change, and FF has been around for 30+ years, and there's these static elements of Chocobos, Jobs, etc. It makes such ppl feel comfortable to pick the games up, knowing what to expect. As we know what happen with such ppl when things don't go according to expectations. This happen a lot for me as well, when my brother invite me over for something like watching a movie, and then we end up not doing that, it just bothers me.
Edit:apparently a large chunk of my post got cut out /shrug

[Recon1o6]

It certainly doesn't help that SE seems to have devs actively watching reddit (commenting on art pieces, clarifying statements etc) yet when a developer actually posted at this forum about rainkmaker hair people were genuinely shocked because we don't see devs here (tech support excluded) Yet this is the official forums!

People are a lot more civil when they know they are being listened to. Reddit though has grown tired of genuine criticism of the game and shuts down any debate even faster.

[Voltyblast]

As far as I know forums are here for feedback and expressing dissapointment and anger at the game is good enough feedback since it does indeed point out there's something wrong with X feature of the game... yet a big portion of the forums is people against people having an opinion and most responses are just unsub from the game, which I think is doing nothing for anyone. SE is good at listening to players and I think we should encourage our voices being heard instead of silenced.

Welcome to MMORPGs, where your opinion is always going to be considered trolling, no matter how constructive or true it may be.

Here's a tip: don't bother. Mind your business. You'll live longer. And possibly prosper.

[Saefinn]

-Sees thread title-
-Sees questionable premise-
-Sees number of posts-
Is this bait? This is the tell tale for a lot of bait we've had recently.

This forum is full of criticism and people are welcome to give it. Just not everybody agrees all the time one whether that criticism is valid or not because people are different and enjoy different things and get different things out of the game.

I've given plenty and have yet to be told to unsub or felt people have been against me having opinions. People have disagreed, but that's different. Just as freely people are welcome to make criticism people are just as freely to disagree with their criticism.

[EtherRose]

You mean normalize "Constructive Feedback". Not "I'm mad because Viera hairstyles so I'll slander SE and tell them how mad I am". Because that apparently is the current hot stuff.

[Alleo]

My issue with most of the criticism that gets posted to general discussion is "I don't like this thing, make it a thing I like" or "please make this game... A different game"

Those are not helpful.

I mean how would should they voice it in your opinion so that it makes it acceptable? If I say that I dont like x and then give a example from another game arent I bascially giving them the answer on how I would like it?
For example I write that I dont like Lord of Verminion and would love something like Pokemon instead. Isnt that feedback they can work with?

What more should people do? We are not devs, we should not need to post a huge wall of text explaining exactly how we would do it. (And some of us do that and they are still called whiners by others.)

In the end if someone likes content its quite normal if they post that they just like it. There is somehow no need to explain it more in detail on what they like or why they like it. For most negative posts though its already common to write at least a few reasons to why they dont like it. IMO that should be enough as feedback.

(And a I dont like it is at least way better feedback for the devs than the people just silently leaving the game)

An important part of civil discourse is for both sides to remain objective. People often get very defensive if their ideas are not accepted by others, which is simply not helpful.

Moreover, as some others said, suggestions on tweaks or adjustments are great, but ..and how to say this.. some suggestions come from an amateur(?) prospective that quickly gets hate.

I guess remaining objective on something that you care about quite a bit is probably not that easy but I agree, that it should be at least civil. I also agree that there are those that simply cant accept that others might not like their ideas but honestly a lot of time the tone of the answering posts also dont help.

I remember reading about a topic where the OP was annoyed at the RP NPC feature and I guess she made the "mistsake" of saying that this feature might even make her unsub. Otherwise though it was simply her opinion and she even wanted to hear why some like it. I was honestly a bit shocked how harsh some of those answers were...as if she had kicked someones puppy instead of just complaining about one feature of the game.

Some people might not accept that not everyone agrees with them and some might want to change things that are basically the basic systems of the game but for me a lot of people simply post their view on different features they dont like (small features too) and then get told that they should unsub or that the NA forum is just full of whiners and horrible...

It probably does not help that the general forum is infested with trolls even if they sometimes have some interesting topics that might be worth discussing.

Unfortunately for the devs ideas and negative feedback will be more common, as nature of people- people don't really comment frequently on what's going well, so that's a bit sad. Definitely don't forget to comment on things you liked lol.

And yet when positive threads exist they barely stay active for long. I guess its partly the nature of a forum itself but sometimes even such a discussion is shut down and not always by the negative crowd either. The amount of posts in the support male viera thread that wanted the thread to die is probably quite huge. Instead of just letting people post in there even if it was running in circles some just needed to post how the arguments annoyed them...instead of just ignoring the topic.

We also had a small thread about the hype for the island sancturary and a few of the posts there were saying that people should not be hyped because afterwards they will just complain.

But I do agree with you, we also need the positive threads because even if some of us like to complain (I do) we mostly do it because we really like the game and want it to be better than its right now. I just wished that those that only go into threads to complain about complainers would use their energy to create interesting positive threads.

[Jin-]

Someone follows Steam FFXIV forums? Do not like one specific aspect of the game? Too bad, you will now be witch hunted by the extreme fanboys :>