Public Discussion: Community Feedback - Is it being heard?

[MintnHoney]

I'd be very surprised if they were reading this forum, I certainly wouldn't if I was a dev.

This take is among the most annoying and short-sighted that I've seen from quite a few people.
For one thing, the developers are requesting that feedback and comments be shared in these forums. So to say that they shouldn't read them means that, one way or the other, they're just lying or being disingenuous at best.

For another thing, if the take is meant to be about how "the non-JP region forums are so rude, because JP is so polite and nice and honest," let's take a moment to remember that their most recent calls for civility from the player community was specifically aimed at JP players, and aired on a JP-only radio show. Not to mention, the most recent shenanigans that transpired when one of their streamers got the 3rd party tool suspension, and the whirlwind of that aftermath.

Finally, they are asking for feedback and comments from players, not a professional Q&A group. They're going to get feedback and comments of all shapes and sizes, from all different levels of emotional to logical, from constructive to... well, not. For a group of professionals to expect their customers, of varying origins, skill levels, and preferences, to be able to provide professional feedback, is nonsense, and that anyone would even suggest that the company is dumb enough to expect it is either shame on the company or ignorance for the sake of ruction.

I would expect that to be exactly what they do. They can't possibly listen to every single person when not everyone agrees and even when feedback is unanimous, sometimes the request is difficult, impossible or not a wise idea. Sometimes players are actually wrong and sometimes developers do actually know better.

Not exactly what I meant. But even with this very polite take, they, then, need to say so, rather than push things away and out of sight, to the point where players can actively say that they haven't seen honest feedback for their years-long issues. They don't have to listen to every single person, but they definitely need to actually take the feedback for what it is rather than saying they'll fix "the problem" and then just make it worse because they never bothered to figure out what the problem actually was.

[SwingLifeAway]

... and that has what, exactly, to do with what I said to colt?

It was a tangent off of the point you made. I was not attacking you, no need to get defensive.

[shao32]

I don't think it's being heard at all, I only can guess but I consider they have a severe problem of feedback delivering and being so full of them selfs they start to think they now what's is the best no matter what as how Yoshi-p expressed himself this last year's.

The first one is a obvious sign since every time they did a community Q&A most of the questions has been ignored and substituted by Yoshi-p fav color and when one of the important matters is finally answered is completely altered and misleading like for example the recent question about Healers.

The second one is like they filtered a lot of the feedback and mostly listen to praises and such, the point that Yoshi-p knows that many want some jobs become similar again like HW DRK and SCH gameplay wise and say this is our path now and keep ignoring the critiques it's just a huge red flag that is expanding to other jobs as we saw, I personally tired of hearing Yoshi-p saying they listen to feedback and ask for more when they deliberately just do the contrary and say "we don't make this changes to ruin your fav job" and keep enforcing the changes on us ignoring all the critiques like they did with DRK rework, Healers changes and a large ect, they made this changes for themselfs not for us I have that pretty much clear at this point.

[Kacho_Nacho]

We're being misconstrued and misunderstood.

-Explaining to your dev that you want more engagement out of general combat gameplay, only to be taken as "you want more difficulty, go play ultimate"

-Explaining to your dev that healer actions are boring because you get the same 2 button dps from 1-90 and not that much healing is actually required in general content, only to be taken as "We'll just increase the need the heal more next xpac"

-Asking your dev for the unique hairstyles for hrothgar/viera that the devs themselves they were gonna work on and deliver, only to receive a very small batch of hair that already existed and is not even implemented well

-Explaining to your dev that certain skills could be reworked and addressing button bloat, only for them to take it as "let's just delete it all. That will solve the problem"

The list goes on really. The feedback is heard but there are such giant leaps on how it's understood or addressed that you start asking yourself if it's done on purpose or is there truly no one in SE who can properly translate the context and intent of the feedbacks.

I agree 100%. It's really vexing and I can't think of any reason for this to be occurring as much as it does except for willful intent on the part of the development team.

These are not dumb individuals, they have translators, and our input is clear. At this point, their responses are coming off as insulting.

[Nizzi]

Those were inherited from the DPS class Arcanist, a problem they obviously weren't happy with so they decided to stop letting it inherit from Arcanist.

Miasma II was specifically for SCH in Stormblood, and Bio, Bio II and Energy Drain are SCH specific now too. It doesn't have anything to do with SCH inheriting it from Arcanist and it has everything to do with their misguided vision of making every healer have 1 nuke and 1 DoT. Saying "it came from Arcanist" isn't some justification for why Miasma, Miasma II, Bane and Shadow Flare were removed, and having things inherited from Arcanist clearly isn't an issue considering SCH still has Physick, Resurrection, Aetherflow, Energy Drain, Ruin, Ruin II, Bio, Bio II that work like old Arcanist's used to. The difference being that they're SCH only actions, not tied to the Arcanist job anymore (except Ressurection). If they did it for Miasma II in Stormblood, they could've easily done it for Miasma, Shadow Flare and Bane as well.

And if they weren't happy with it... that's tough, I guess? Shouldn't it be the players who are happy with the jobs? I don't really care if a job design team doesn't like how a job in a role plays if the playerbase does. Their all encompassing "vision" for this game is becoming a massive detriment and making it incredibly boring across all jobs to play.

It's evident that how busy both of them were in Stormblood was seen as a problem by SE and addressed in Shadowbringers like a lot of other issues were.

Just because a lot of people on the forums liked how busy they were doesn't mean that everyone who plays the game liked it and there can be regional differences as well. Even if this is something that SE didn't listen to, it doesn't change all the other things that they did listen to over the years.

This is a cop-out. Have you been to the DPS forums lately? SAM mains across JP and NA are both outraged about the loss of Kaiten. Why should we, as players, care that the development team is unhappy with something that we're happy with? Acting as if it's "just people on the forums" is a cop-out too, because even the developers have admitted before that most people just quit and do not bother voicing their feedback. We can entertain the idea that perhaps people didn't like SCH having more than 1 Nuke and 1 DoT in Stormblood, and we can even entertain the idea that it's only "a lot of people on the forums" who liked how healers used to be (even though I see this sentiment all over youtube, reddit, and twitter) but why would they not just tell those people to play something else?

This is where the frustration comes from. They aren't making these changes for us, they're making them for themselves, either to make their work balancing and designing easier or to have the jobs easier to manage, but not for us. If there was truly a massive amount of Scholar players who didn't want its old DoTs to return, you'd see that whenever the idea is raised. You don't, though. You can search the names of SCH's DoTs on Twitter or Reddit and you'll find people saying things like "SCH used to be way more fun" or sad that they were removed. Same for Aero III on WHM. I've also spent a lot of time scouring the JP forums here trying to see if people were asking for SCH's DoTs to be removed during Stormblood, and I haven't been able to find anything. It has nothing to do the players liking it; Yoshida didn't like it, and he admitted as much when he was asked about it going into ShB.

I do not care if Yoshida and his team have a "problem" with jobs being different and fun. I have a problem when they change everything to be the same boring slop and then people on the forum come with ridiculous SE apologism trying to defend every awful change and design decision this company makes. Perhaps if they cared about the players having fun first instead of themselves seeing problem boogeymen where they aren't, we wouldn't be in this state of perpetual discontent within the healer role.

[D6Damager]

I think that they are very much aware of the Forums and Reddit. But much like WoW, they already have their development plan/schedule and are sticking to it regardless.

[Jeeqbit]

Miasma II was specifically for SCH in Stormblood

Miasma II was essentially replaced with Art of War and wasn't worth using for single target, so in a way it's still there.

This is a cop-out. Have you been to the DPS forums lately? SAM mains across JP and NA are both outraged about the loss of Kaiten.

I can't keep track of so many forums to be honest. I can see that people were unhappy about Kaiten being removed though.

[Nizzi]

Miasma II was essentially replaced with Art of War and wasn't worth using for single target, so in a way it's still there.

If we're giving credit where credit is due, I personally think Art of War is better for AoE with the MP costs and not having to spam overwrite a DoT, but I still don't like the outright removal of it. If they had such a problem with AoE DoTs being used on ST, they should've done what they did with Thunder on BLM and made them overwrite the other, but it is what it is and I don't particularly feel SCH 'needs' it back considering it was replaced with AoW like you said, and SCH doesn't need Miasma II for weave windows anymore like it did in SB. There is something interesting about having AoE buttons also be good for ST encounters though, but I can understand the desire to keep them separate. That being said, I do have a problem with the removal of Miasma, Shadow Flare and Bane making SCH go from 4 AoE damage buttons to the only job with only 1 in the game. It's very boring, and the return of just those buttons would do wonders for the job.

I can't keep track of so many forums to be honest. I can see that people were unhappy about Kaiten being removed though.

I have no life, which lends well to doing a lot of reading :P

[DiaDeem]

Community Feedback - Is it being heard?

It is. Just because the devs aren't doing exactly what a few angry people in the forums want, doesn't mean that they're deaf to community concerns. We shouldn't take for granted how communicative Yoshida is either. Some developers wouldn't have even addressed the bans as he did, let alone acknowledge that their next move is to use community made tools as inspiration to keep improving their UI.

They let people who got refunded accidentally during the 6.1 housing fiasco just keep their gil btw.

Never take the good things we have for granted.

[CKNovel]

They listen to some feedback, that's for sure.
Dark knight is a good example, BW was put on charge and LD is now good.

But they also have their own opinions about how the job should play and the game direction.
Healer role is a good example. No real DPS rotation and the gameplay revolves around waiting the next big chunk of damage.

And then there art parts where they agree but won't move a lot of things.
MCH is a good example, still low damage for a pure DPS, no utility and one of the few jobs that lacks charges and needs it.