Player and developer communication

[Kolsykol]

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

I mean we have a section of the forum dedicated to the Jobs, we don't for glam.
So it makes sense general would be where people talk about glam and less about Jobs.

[Larirawiel]

The player <-> dev communication is not great but it is OK, IMHO. I do not see, that the devs and designers are living in an ivory tower and are immune to feedback.


Cheers

[ReynTime]

People are gonna argue there is a lot more communication going on here compared to other games. And it's true.

But the way they take player feedback now compared to 2011~2015...? It's far, far cry from how it used to be. Probably because the game hit it big and now they only respond when things get really really bad, and the Letters only exist exclusively to build hype for patches now. For better or for worse there was a level of "our players know what they want and we should try to deliver it" in the first years Yoshi-P was around. Now it's more like "we know you want X but we want to give you Y because we care more about the players less invested in the game".
They don't even pay much attention outside twitter anymore.

[Tyjacon]

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

And you heard it where?
Just asking.

Unless I missed something I don't ever remember SE mentioning their job design team composition.
Just a rumor unless proven otherwise.

[Maxilor]

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.

Thanks for taking the time to provide evidence. That's actually wild.