Future direction of FFXIV

[Lauront]

This is a non sequitur, but sure - the point is that none of these are representative of the player base as a whole. Further, internet fights about the game being good or bad are incredibly silly regardless. If you like the game, play it. If you don't like the game, don't play it.

Sorry, not really seeing how it's a "non sequitur". In relation to what is it a "non sequitur"? It's a question to see whether you apply this principle both ways. That said, I would agree, but I have seen plenty of instances of people attempting to use Metacritic, Reddit and Twitter feedback (which tends to be more/far more on the positive side) to dismiss individual complaints/feedback about the game...

Your lack of access to good evidence does not make your bad evidence good. Put another way, Generalizing from a small, self-selecting group of players isn't more valid because you don't have systematic data. SE has some revealed preference data, such as subs, online store, content completion, etc.; that data isn't available to you, but it doesn't follow that SE never looks at it.

On the other hand, the sources of feedback they most frequently allude to as drawing upon in interviews are Reddit and Twitter. I'd like to think that they do competent validation work of this, but as you say, this isn't available to me. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. The company has some rather huge failures under its belt, such as FF15 and its horrendous development issues, and Avengers more recently, so merely having data available to it and analysing it properly - if it does - doesn't mean much on its own.

Past success is no guarantor of future success, as WoW amply proved.