The feeling of beeing Home ...

[TaleraRistain]

Like many there, I would have liked to not reconnect with others scions already at 6.1. It's very weird, especially after the goodbye speech at the end of 6.0.

I didn't find it weird at all.

In Shadowbringers, we came very close to losing our friends. We the player knew that a means to get them home was going to be presented. But we the character didn't.

In Endwalker, we the player knew the Scions would be okay. But we the character didn't. That Endwalker debuff that made us walk slow wasn't just for show. We were at the lowest point of our life. We had lost everyone that was closest to us, one by one, and we couldn't do anything to stop it because we knew it had to happen. And when we get them back, we send our friends away and choose to face possible death alone.

Then we succeed and we go home. We "break up" our little party to all outward appearances, while knowing that we aren't really broken up among ourselves and we're just making it look that way to the rest of the world. We stay apart to not raise suspicions. An unknown number of months later (6.1 could have displayed this much better since we only know this from developer interviews) we find a reason to start checking up on our friends again. It makes complete sense to me that we'd want to reconnect and drag them into our shenanigans.

For me what would have been leagues weirder would be suddenly having completely new faces coming along with us with no background or foundation on why we should work with and trust them. I think they have plenty of room to have this or that Scion attending to something else in upcoming stories and gradually build our relationships with others. It seems to me that it would weaken the narrative if they're just there with very little explanation why except "cuz new".

[Deveryn]

Let's not forget how things started. We didn't meet everyone at once and who we met first depended on where we started.

[hagare]

Part of what Yoshida believes/believed is the approach to making it successful is to listen to one's customers. Not exactly unheard of as a principle in business.

you don't listen to karens

[aveyond-dreams]

If that were true then they shouldn’t be making decisions around the opinions of players on Twitter either, whose influence has led to no small number of controversies.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Yeah, clearly they should instead listen to the forums that hate everything and get aggressive and self-righteous when anyone disagrees with them.

[aveyond-dreams]

Negative feedback has to exist somewhere. Whether you agree with the way people word their statements is another matter entirely. People have been ignored and feel like they’re not being listened to or that their feedback isn’t getting passed onto the proper channels. When you treat non-insignificant amounts of the playerbase like this, it diminishes the consumer-business relationship over time to the point where there isn’t one remaining any longer.

Hence why me and many others log in for minutes instead of hours each week, if even that.

[Lustre]

Yeah, clearly they should instead listen to the forums that hate everything and get aggressive and self-righteous when anyone disagrees with them.

Strawman detected, if you want an echo chamber go to reddit, this is the only place people can say what they want without hordes of gcbtw catgirls downvoting you into oblivion because you said something they didnt like about their favourite bland UWUUUU character. If the overall tone on the official forums (the only place that isnt aggressively moderated and curated to promote a positive image of the game) is negative, that's for a reason.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Strawman detected, if you want an echo chamber go to reddit, this is the only place people can say what they want without hordes of gcbtw catgirls downvoting you into oblivion because you said something they didnt like about their favourite bland UWUUUU character. If the overall tone on the official forums (the only place that isnt aggressively moderated and curated to promote a positive image of the game) is negative, that's for a reason.

You do realize you just completely proved my point, right?

[Lauront]

It's entirely possible and even desired in business to listen to your customers but still maintain your own vision and identity. If you constantly act only on the whims of customers, then that becomes unsustainable. Either you start to lose customers because you're too lenient and trying to keep up with demands becomes impossible and causes you to neglect other customers, or you're so inconsistent your customers can't have faith in you. My company actively seeks customer input, but there are some things some of them ask for that are just flat out impossible to accommodate.

I would argue that Yoshida's team has been too lenient and now that they are starting to push back more, people who were used to the old way are unhappy. But setting boundaries is going to be healthy for them in the long run.

These problems are not novel to business. They are why tools such as customer lifetime value models exist, so you can evaluate which customer relationships are most valuable and concentrate on those or building more like those. How is it that you think they're being "too lenient"? For instance, on the issue of how they went about adding Hrothgar hairstyles, or the persistent and widespread complaints about healer gameplay being very boring? I will agree that they probably do try to accommodate too many demands, but that is precisely why they need to be quite methodical in how they get feedback, and how they analyse it.

I definitely agree that maintaining a vision and identity are important but the point there is you can't just grow complacent about what you're doing and need to constantly engage the feedback you get from your customers; even the ones who say nothing. Bad word of mouth is in and of itself a potential source of lost sales. The game lacks any real strong competitors at the moment, with WoW shooting itself in its foot, and it is also a major source of revenue for SE - no matter how much integrity of the artistic vision matters, you can safely bet that they are very conscious about ensuring the game remains a profitable stream of revenue. SE is no stranger to making some very bad decisions in what it believes will achieve this goal, ones which can be very tone deaf and ignorant of its customers' actual desires. The lessons Yoshi learnt from 1.0 are valuable ones.

You do realize you just completely proved my point, right?

Well it was less of a point, more just shade being thrown at the OF. Every site they harvest feedback from has its issues. Twitter is horrendous for conducting proper discussions because of the nested nature of comments and the fact that people create their own little echo chamber bubbles on it. Reddit has pervasive issues with groupthink and downvoting, and behaviours that go beyond this (e.g. stalking) and has similar problems with how the discussions eventually become too nested to follow. The OF isn't the best moderated site, in spite of being under SE's control, and (this is can be taken as a + or -) requires a sub, but it is at least free of the downvote system and the nesting issues/conversational bubbles that can hinder discussion on Twitter. At the end of the day, this is a site they have set up to create engagement with their product and to harness feedback. It is not much to ask of them to put some of the effort they devote towards gathering feedback, sometimes on sites with an even more aggressive tone, to their own forum, and to ensure moderation is set up to keep matters civil and engage with their customers on it, as they do on Twitter for example.

[MikkoAkure]

The official forums likely have far less users than the FFXIV reddit and I wouldn't exactly call this place a realistic representative of the game's population as a whole when it's the same 50 or so people talking back and forth.

If your ideas don't do well when presented to a larger audience, maybe the problem isn't the audience but your ideas themselves.