Player and developer communication

[StriderShinryu]

I doubt the devs actually take any community feed back. Even JP feedback. Just look at the state of MCH, or WHM. The state of tanking and healing as a whole. The list goes on and on.

Reaper and male Viera exist pretty much exclusively because of player feedback. So.. yeah.

[Ayche]

When the customer base jumps up a magnitude, direct communication pretty much has to go.
For multiple reasons, but even for the sake of fairness, you cannot give this, unspecific, concentration of players more attention than this other group of players, even if they are more vocal about it.
Let's think about the numbers they are willing to release. In a chart shared with the press, the game had 4 million registered users in 2015, then hit 10 million at the release of third expansion Stormblood in 2017. And then 24 million announced before Endwalker.
In face of such growth, singular voices become more and more insignificant really.

[Caurcas]

Reaper and male Viera exist pretty much exclusively because of player feedback. So.. yeah.

And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

[dapperfaffer]

And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

Thats because both male and female Viera are modified Miqo'te and Hrothgar males are modified Roe skeletons.

[Vrankyl]

And male Viera are a second class race like FViera and Hrothgar....so what feedback they take they implement half done.

Tbf Female Viera are also a thing only because SE was listening to player feedback. They were going to go all in with Hrothgar, but decided a bit later into the game to listen to the player demands since they wanted to stop making new races after that. Which shows they probably should have just ignored the requests for viera and stuck to their guns with Hrothgar. They gambled and lost big time, and now have to keep working on two races for some time because of it.

[Ravor]

I play many MMMorpg and I think the ff14 dev explained a lot of their decision making and game design in the live letter, they were not obligated to do that much explaining but they did, one of the reason why the dev is doing a somewhat balanced good (and bad) job at the same time is because they use both logical and emotional aspect in balance to make the vision forward, if they simply use logical approach on development, just look at many predatory money hungry Game out there, more focus on make it easier to play the game if you pay more than other player, or simply look at data statistic and see how many people play what class and buff other underused class or nerf overused class, but the dev will take some emotional approach by hearing to some player thought that perhaps illogical or the data statistic disagree, this could work and also could fireback, this is really a tricky stuff to do, also just for my opinion on the ff14 dev focus, they will give more focus on casual stuff aside from combat

[Sebazy]

Citation needed.

I went into depth on this a few years ago.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

As to how that stands today, I believe Sato has been promoted to a producer role below Yoshida whilst still effectively overseeing battle system design as a whole, whilst another team member was taken on in his place. I've not dug through the credits to be sure but I'm guessing team are currently at 4.5 to 5 members depending on what else Sato is managing now.

And yes, SE are generally pretty good at communicating feedback with players. They have historically been rather quiet on the healer front though, I suspect Yoshida's comments about WHM vs SCH healing early on and the bewilderment it produced kind of burned them on that topic. It's also worth keeping in mind that they do seemingly vet or at least reserve the right to veto interview questions. Whilst this is pretty much the norm, it does also highlight that they are hardly fielding 'Ask me anythings' here.

[Jeeqbit]

Player and developer communication https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...r-Questions%21

[Garet]

For me this game has one of he most healthy player dev communication because of Yoshida. After the failure of 1.0 Yoshida made it one of his principle to listen to the playerbase. Of course they cannot see and hear all, and they will still need to balance player feedback with their overall vision and direction of the game.

[IdowhatIwant]

Too much of player feedback is regarding glamour, and not enough is about class balance or design.

A lot of this games problems also stem from the devs listening to feedback as well.