Dev Harassment is concerning

[Broken_Wind]

At the end of the day, we’re customers buying a product and nothing else. Square Enix, Blizzard or whoever else aren’t my friends, they’re doing it as a profession and I’m doing it as a hobby with disposable income. I’m entitled to criticise it, even harshly, and I’m also entitled to stop buying it. The key issue with MMOs is that they’re intended to be cash cows for executives so if enough of us stopped playing, for example, there would be questions for the devs to answer internally but that’s not the players problem.

You certainly do act entitled, yes.

But to be less snarky, you can voice your displeasure productively which has a better chance of leading to a better product with changes by the FFXIV that does care about its players
Or you can rage and act spoiled and any decisions made because of that (if any) are more likely to come from square enix who doesnt care about you at all.

[Laphicet]

You certainly do act entitled, yes.

But to be less snarky, you can voice your displeasure productively which has a better chance of leading to a better product with changes by the FFXIV that does care about its players
Or you can rage and act spoiled and any decisions made because of that (if any) are more likely to come from square enix who doesnt care about you at all.

Healer mains have tried voicing complaints about constant dumbing down, lore being gutted, 1spam being boring, etc etc kindly and """"productively""" for years and look where that has gotten us.

[aveyond-dreams]

Do not release incomplete and broken features. This is not acceptable to huge swathes of the paying consumer base. Goodwill is being lost with each of these controversies mounting on top of each other, some of which players like me saw coming back since late Stormblood. Do better.

[Burmecia]

Hello all!
(snip)
TL;DR stop being mean pls

I appreciate this message, good post op.

[Sorimachi87]

Hello all!

I am new to posting here and I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this but I feel its necessary to be said regardless. I've seen quite a lot of heated discussions about the player housing situation and a few other past events where players have felt slighted or in some way inconvenienced and overwhelmingly people have been voicing their frustrations in a way that seems a tad overkill. Frustration is one thing but calling devs names or being hysterical about this or any situation does nothing but cause real people to be stressed out. I know we often laud the dev team and Yoshi-P especially but the opposite can be true too. Very bi-polar which is to be expected from such a large MMO audience.

I hope people who read this can voice their frustrations more gently and constructively in the future. I'm sorry you were inconvenienced but this is a game that you enjoy and its a career that game devs slave at to make. the disparity between our commitments is immeasurable. They want to make the best game they can and believing otherwise is foolish. I don't mean this to be another "praise Yoshi-P!" post so please understand that I just think our collective voices when compounded have a very drastic effect on real people and we should act accordingly.

TL;DR stop being mean pls

Thanks OP for the thread. This is a new system afaik, so theres bound to be complications and.. lets be real. The message they wrote might be unsatisfying to most of you, but their reaction is faster then probably most other companies would ever do.
Yes it is our money, our subscription fee, this however should never justify harassment or even death threats.

And in the midst of this hellfire. We have easter holidays so...
Happy easter regardless of what is happening here at the moment.

[rewd]

I'm glad you are following your own advice, Blackmagebro.

[Insertusernamehere]

"There is no such a thing my thread, you made it available publicly when you share it on forum." now you are angry because people voicing their opinion and their opinion not what you want to hear.

Whatever.. do what ever you like, it is entertaining

[Big_Bap]

My man gonna replace the Dark Knight NPC. That's how angry he is.

[rainichan]

Well this thread certainly took a turn!

While I don't disagree with the original post- most game devs are overworked and working crunch times is insane for them- the right for people to voice their displeasure is there. However, voicing it in a a way that isn't precisely like how you're attacking people, OP, is the way to go about it. I worked retail for 13 years, and while I could usually let stuff roll off my back, there were some days where that just didn't happen, things said from the smallest things where I got personally attacked never really ended well. People have their breaking points, and calling devs names or being hurtful, like your wonderful examples, OP, isn't how we should be conducting ourselves.

The devs are working on a fix. Yoshida has said as much (at about 3am JST, even) and despite their corporate overlords, they do want to make players happy. I don't know if their fix will make everyone happy, but I know they'll try.

tl;dr don't be like OP in their subsequent posts after the first, they're giving a great example of what not to do with the devs.

[Packetdancer]

most game devs are overworked and working crunch times is insane for them

I had a week where I worked two 36-hour-straight shifts due to crunch time, and this was at a company that generally did not do crunch. I fell asleep for a few hours in my office because I was too tired to go home, and I lived literally across the street from the office. I could see my apartment from the window I sat by. I do not think I was writing particularly good code by the end, and I definitely know I was commenting said code in haiku. (Yes, I'm serious. I and my co-workers doing the same crunch had crossed some sort of transcendental sleep deprivation event horizon and were absolutely functioning in an altered state of mind by the end.)

To this day, I could not tell you how the network replication code I wrote that week works. It did work, but I have no freakin' clue how. And while I don't know what SQEX's crunch time situation is or isn't, I can absolutely understand dumb mistakes being made under deadline pressure.

ANYWAY.

Expressing displeasure with the company's actions -- or perceived carelessness, or anything else -- is perfectly reasonable and justified. I tend towards a more measured approach, but that's admittedly because I've been on the other side of that divide and seen how easily stuff like this happens, especially in a large codebase that's been live for the better part of a decade and touched by countless different programmers, not all of whom are necessarily still at the company. (And if crunch time is a factor as well...) There's a breathtaking number of potential failure points, and very few game studios -- heck, very few software companies -- adhere to what I would now consider a solid test methodology. (Many have excellent QA teams, but the companies tend to approach QA by validating that a feature works when you follow the intended steps, not by the test engineering method of having a comprehensive test matrix and running through every cell of that matrix to see if a feature fails when other seemingly-unrelated factors are introduced. The first method is much faster, but also much more likely to let stuff slip through.)

Just because I can see how something can go wrong doesn't make it acceptable, though; this was a feature that was seemingly insufficiently tested and rolled out more hastily than it should have been. (To be fair, if they'd delayed it to do more thorough testing, I think there'd also be rage and ire on the forums, albeit a different type of rage and ire.)

People have a right to be upset, and to express that upset by posting to demand answers as to what happened, or by unsubscribing to show that they no longer have faith in the developer or interest in the game.

But there have been some posts here -- and waaaaaaay more in Other Parts of the Internet (like the one represented by a blue bird that seems the embodiment of despair and proclamations of doom -- no, not that one, I meant Twitter) -- that start to get to an area where, where I on the dev team, I might start to feel uncomfortable. Not all threaten violence -- even if some do -- but there have been more than a few out there where folks have said things like that the lottery was "a scam" and that the individual developers who worked on the feature should be taken to court and fined (or jailed?!) because it was actual fraud. (Cue "...that's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!" meme.)

And while OP went into some sort of Total Nuclear Emotional Forum-Spamming Meltdown there (also: yikes), there is some validity to at least the general gist of the initial post: people don't have to be making actual literal death threats to still be crossing a line in a manner that's... y'know, let's go with "maybe not entirely reasonable or appropriate to the severity of the situation".

Hold the company responsible, sure. Firmly request (or demand) an explanation of where the failure of process happened that led to this situation. Vote with your wallets and unsubscribe if you feel you can no longer support the company; that's a completely fair way to feel, and I don't think anyone will say otherwise.

But speaking from my own past experience, I can tell you that when the dev team I was on got weird over-the-top threats because people didn't like a change we made to multiplayer PvP balance on a game, the experience did not particularly make me feel more motivated to go out and make posts explaining why the changes were made. (E.g., "because the old stuff was being used to cheat, and we wanted to make it so people were not cheating".) It made me feel motivated to ignore them all and delete my bookmarks to any forums involved. And sure, they weren't the majority of players, but they were the loudest. Which made them irritatingly hard to ignore.

Press the company for answers. Unsubscribe. Whatever you feel needs to be done. But try to focus it on the company not on... like... demanding the individual developers be held accountable for deliberate fraud or whatever.