you want changes? make a loud coordinated racket nicely i might add

[Avoidy]

I wanna be wrong on this because I got enough of it playing Korean MMOs, but I'm pretty sure they only make changes based on forum feedback when they see it on the Japanese forum. Every once in a while someone necroposts a <PROBLEM> megathread on the English forums from 2015 where there are hundreds of pages of people signing on to say they'd love to see an issue addressed, and the issue will be something super basic, but here we are still dealing with it in 2022. Meanwhile, Japanese players blew up the forums and accused Yoshi of BLM pvp bias and the game got shut down, like, a day later to make immediate job changes. Compare that to like... the english dps forums blowing up over kaiten changes and they won't even issue a statement about their intent behind it. Or the issues with packet loss, where people on NA/EU were complaining about the lag for ages and never got a response. Then it affected Japanese players and all of a sudden they got a lodestone announcement about it.

I agree with your sentiment that there needs to be a focus on the game as an international product. Lots of studios forget this. They go global, but they only want to listen to players who speak their language while ignoring their much larger audiences abroad and it results in the product falling apart. I saw this in Tera, I saw it in BDO, I saw it in Maplestory, etc. etc. People told me to come play XIV because this game was different, but the only area where I see a difference is that the devs actually play the game and seem to care about it. And that is nice. But the rest of it is the same song and dance. Stupid monetary policies (b2p + subscription + cash shop that sells things that should just be in the game, why), dripfeed of content, and no actual communication about game changes no matter how much people beg them for it. We're never given a window into like, okay, WHY did you remove kaiten. WHY did you remove lord/lady of crowns. WHY did you turn the cone aoe into a circle. It just happens and when we don't like it, we can go scream into the wind on the forum while it's ignored for 2 years.

If you want to see change when it's gotten to this point, you have to be willing to let go, I think. Know why AST keeps getting reworked? Because it's got lower numbers of people playing it than the other healers. That's it. WHMs and SCHs never seem terribly happy either, but they keep crawling back to the job and square doesn't actually read feedback; they just observe metrics and change things based on that. Notice how they're doing a DRG rework that every DRG is dreading? Why? No communication there. They're just doing it. Hope you like it! If you don't, no point complaining about it. Just play something else and hope that in a year they see those metrics and change it again. I seriously don't think they read anything here and this is all pointless. I want to be wrong though.