Yoshi-P Statement on Player Feedback

[Rhysati]

FFXIV has gotten better with every expansion and that trend continued with EndWalker. Who are these whiners who say otherwise?

Didn't read the whole thread, but had to respond to this gem. First, such a claim is highly subjective.

Second, from what I can tell the overwhelming majority of the community disagrees with you simply on the basis that ARR and HW were loved but Stormblood was widely considered to be the worst expansion the game has has. The next one really kicked some tail and is one of the best MMO expansions ever possibly.

Now, we come to Endwalker: Personally I think that Endwalker is the worst expansion the game has had and I think time will show that as people stop having buyers remorse and look objectively at it. The development team skimped on the basics, reusing gear sets for most of the gear we got with the expansion. The dungeons are all extremely linear, boring slogs. And the story has massive pacing issues that are undeniable. Subjectively, I also feel like the story content is the worst I've seen in an MMO. Yes, seriously. This entire expansion's story can be chalked up to being a bunch of short stories, jammed together into one long "tale" by someone who was having psychedelic fever dreams while they were writing.

Killing a god early on? Check. Running errands for people while the world around you is burning? Check. Finding out that the moon is actually a spaceship? Check. Said spaceship is filled with intelligent bunny people who are pointlessly obsessed with everything that is stereotypical of rabbits like carrots? ...sigh...check. Mass Effect style space craft is suddenly available with a technology that doesn't even remotely match anything else in Eorzea, leaving one to wonder just how the hell they crafted this thing? Yup.

I've never been less interested or frustrated with a story in an mmo like I am with this one.

[Shibi]

From the roughly a year I’ve been here they seem to react to feedback, it’s obvious in patches. But they don’t come on here and talk, which really sucks. I’d love to see more interaction.

It's understandable that some bilinguals or polyglots are a little scared to talk in a professional capacity in a non-native language until they are quite fluent. While they can listen, and answer simply, they don't have enough nuance to be able to speak freely.

Can you imagine how the English community would howl if a Japanese speaking dev mistakenly mixed up his words and promised one thing, then he meant something else? That mistake would be in some people's signatures for a decade, taunting the original words with untold butthurt. (and yes, there are a few of these "I will never forget what you promised in 2015" signatures in this forum.)

[Thatusernameistaken]

I'll confess, I'm not sure why you're quoting me when my point was a general statement and not directed at anyone in particular - or why there's an attempt to frame an acknowledgement of nuance as some grave sin or reasonable point. Furthermore, please do feel free to show me where I excused abuse given that I specifically stated in my post that the terms of service should be adhered to.

I guess we see very different amounts of nuance in this argument then. To me it's very cut and dry that it's fine to have a negative opinion as long as it's expressed in non-toxic ways that don't demean or dehumanize. I can't think of a single scenario where I'd be like "Well ackshually...maybe in this scenario it's ok to be a toxic a-hole when giving my feedback.". So I see very little to no nuance in this discussion, and I'm genuinely curious what nuance you see that would ever make it acceptable or beneficial to be a toxic a-hole when giving feedback. This is why I think the tone policing argument holds no weight here. Assuming you also can't conceive of an acceptable scenario to be a toxic a-hole when giving feedback, then it's perfectly reasonable to police out toxic a-hole behavior and bringing it up as some form of nuance is just silly when we all agree it needs to happen.

[Snorky]

Didn't read the whole thread, but had to respond to this gem. First, such a claim is highly subjective.

Second, from what I can tell the overwhelming majority of the community disagrees with you simply on the basis that ARR and HW were loved but Stormblood was widely considered to be the worst expansion the game has has. The next one really kicked some tail and is one of the best MMO expansions ever possibly.

This is a opinion show me the actual poll that is relavent saying this is a fact

Now, we come to Endwalker: Personally I think that Endwalker is the worst expansion the game has had and I think time will show that as people stop having buyers remorse and look objectively at it. The development team skimped on the basics, reusing gear sets for most of the gear we got with the expansion. The dungeons are all extremely linear, boring slogs. And the story has massive pacing issues that are undeniable. Subjectively, I also feel like the story content is the worst I've seen in an MMO. Yes, seriously.

This entire expansion's story can be chalked up to being a bunch of short stories, jammed together into one long "tale" by someone who was having psychedelic fever dreams while they were writing.

This is not a criticism of the game but a insult directed at the writers of the story is it necessary to be insulting, we get it you didn't like the story.

Killing a god early on? Check. Running errands for people while the world around you is burning? Check. Finding out that the moon is actually a spaceship? Check. Said spaceship is filled with intelligent bunny people who are pointlessly obsessed with everything that is stereotypical of rabbits like carrots? ...sigh...check. Mass Effect style space craft is suddenly available with a technology that doesn't even remotely match anything else in Eorzea, leaving one to wonder just how the hell they crafted this thing? Yup.

I've never been less interested or frustrated with a story in an mmo like I am with this one.

I just want to say that you should read the whole thread, you are going on half the information and forming a opinion with out the whole picture. The comments I bolded is exactly why Yoshida asked people not to be insulting. From the very first sentence we got your point and you took it into a long explanation only to throw a jab at the writers.

I guess I maybe wrong but honestly if I don't like a book or story I stop reading it. If I pick up a book and find the story lackluster after reading it I tend not to give the writer anymore money by not buying their books. Same can be said for a game that is story centric. I just feel like you should have read what this thread is about before commenting. To each their own I enjoyed the EW conclusion.

[Gameovers]

People just need to be decent human beings and express whatever issues they have in a matter that doesn't insult anyone. But that in itself is a hard ask cause people think emotionally and not with logic 90% of the time.

[Zabuza]

Doesn't help that some people are blissfully unaware of the effect their words have in situations like this. When someone puts their heart, soul, and several years into a project, only to be told by people that it sucks, and that person should never work on a project again, it's soul crushing.

I know this because I went through it. I was torn a new one by the crowd when I submitted my years long project, told I should probably give it up. So I did, not wanting to go through that again. At the time, the project was my pride and joy. Looking back on it logically, yes there were flaws in my project. If the reviewers criticized constructively instead of looking to break me, I'd have probably had a different reaction. But instead, any time I try to continue that work, I struggle, overthink about how to make it perfect, and end up giving up. I normally take insults in stride, but it's different when it's something you've poured yourself into for years.

We can also look at the WoW situation. I'm not saying the devs aren't at how fault for how it had been going downhill since BfA, but the community sucked the soul out of them, and the devs eventually turned adversarial towards their own community. Never did the community stop to think what their relentless attacks on the devs were doing. No matter what they submitted, it was wrong and sucked. After a certain amount of times being told that, it's not unlikely to either lose passion for the work, or give up entirely.

So yes, please do consider your words carefully. We do want the game to improve, but we don't want to suck the soul out of the devs to the point this game starts rolling downhill like WoW.

[Nyarlha]

It doesn't help that some people seem to have a parasocial relationship with the game or the role/job they play.

In the end, every change, every design choice, is up to the devs. If they decided to go one way with an element of gameplay or a job, acting like they kicked your dog on the forums isn't going to change anything. At some point, you have to cut your losses or you're just wasting energy being so emotionnaly invested into something that won't change.

We have people here that have been complaining for years about certain things. Things that obviously the devs have no intention of changing or they'd have done it by now. At some point, I have to ask : what are you actually expecting?

[Semirhage]

Healers offered hundreds of pages of polite feedback for years. The gameplay is now 11111111111111111. If you want polite feedback, don't respond to persistent polite feedback with "nope, you're getting 11111111111111 and you're gonna like it or get out". You wouldn't accept that BS on YOUR main job, so miss me with that plea for genteel criticism. You guys don't play any classes other than DPS and it -shows-.

[Snorky]

Healers offered hundreds of pages of polite feedback for years. The gameplay is now 11111111111111111. If you want polite feedback, don't respond to persistent polite feedback with "nope, you're getting 11111111111111 and you're gonna like it or get out". You wouldn't accept that BS on YOUR main job, so miss me with that plea for genteel criticism. You guys don't play any classes other than DPS and it -shows-.

Do you think it's your right to be nasty to people you never met? Because your comment shows you have no idea how to give constructive feed back. The very minute you start insulting you have lost. That's reality, people will shut down anything you have to say after you insult them. So all you are doing at that point is being obnoxious.

[Semirhage]

Do you think it's your right to be nasty to people you never met? Because your comment shows you have no idea how to give constructive feed back. The very minute you start insulting you have lost. That's reality, people will shut down anything you have to say after you insult them. So all you are doing at that point is being obnoxious.

That's not what I said. What I said was, don't tell me you want polite feedback, then proceed to ignore polite feedback for the better part of a decade, then bemoan the fact that some of the feedback isn't polite.

11111111111111 is bad game design.