This game is on a terrible state right now.

[Theodric]

No business succeeds through mindless praise. Even fancy restaurants widely celebrated for their incredible cuisine will change up their menu to remain competitive and relevant.

[Ayche]

For god's sake, whoever you are, drop the cringe business consultant larping. It is cringe.
It is normal to keep posting how bored the game is making you, but just shut up about actual sales and performance.
None of us work there, they have the actual numbers on subscriber retention, none on us don't.

[Stormpeaks]

For god's sake, whoever you are, drop the cringe business consultant larping. It is cringe.
It is normal to keep posting how bored the game is making you, but just shut up about actual sales and performance.
None of us work there, they have the actual numbers on subscriber retention, none on us don't.

That's actually a great move, that way we cant judge a game at all by its popularity since you can just deny any sort of metrics, saying that "it's not the entire population" or "only them have the real numbers", knowing VERY WELL that they will never release those numbers because it wouldnt look good for them, once again, you use that to your convenience so it fits your narrative, that's not how a sample works, and the steamcharts metric is a good example of that, people keep denying it, while it is in fact a good metric and gives a downward trend since about 3 months.

[Ayche]

That's actually a great move, that way we cant judge a game at all by its popularity since you can just deny any sort of metrics, saying that "it's not the entire population" or "only them have the real numbers", knowing VERY WELL that they will never release those numbers because it wouldnt look good for them, once again, you use that to your convenience so it fits your narrative, that's not how a sample works, and the steamcharts metric is a good example of that, people keep denying it, while it is in fact a good metric and gives a downward trend since about 3 months.

No normal customer has any sane reason to actually care a lick about how popular a game is. At an extreme end where you literally can no longer play a multiplayer game cos the pop is so low as the only exception (don't even waste breath bringing up FFXIV running out of player for patch days), one might only really obsess over game popularity as a proxy for weird tribal wars where you can "prove" how bad x is or how good y is in comparison. And so it is not left unsaid, that loser behavior. Obsessing over game's popularity as a customer is loser behavior. Don't bother replying more proofs about reading public data sets how tailend of patches have less players than expansion highs, I am interested.

Developers have the genuine reason to care, their wage relies on it. If FFXIV goes away in the future, I might be sad over it, not fatal. For the devs that means layoffs, a bit more consequential. If you wanna go check your internet message board scoreboard for wins, go do that.

[Stormpeaks]

No normal customer has any sane reason to actually care a lick about how popular a game is. At an extreme end where you literally can no longer play a multiplayer game cos the pop is so low as the only exception (don't even waste breath bringing up FFXIV running out of player for patch days), one might only really obsess over game popularity as a proxy for weird tribal wars where you can "prove" how bad x is or how good y is in comparison. And so it is not left unsaid, that loser behavior. Obsessing over game's popularity as a customer is loser behavior. Don't bother replying more proofs about reading public data sets how tailend of patches have less players than expansion highs, I am interested.

Developers have the genuine reason to care, their wage relies on it. If FFXIV goes away in the future, I might be sad over it, not fatal. For the devs that means layoffs, a bit more consequential. If you wanna go check your internet message board scoreboard for wins, go do that.

Alright lmao, if you think people shouldnt care about player number and the popularity, that's your take on it, personally if I have 50 people to meet, and 100 people, I'll take the 100, there's more people for me to meet in the second case, but as I said, you do you and you have the right to your take, as ridiculous as it is

[Theodric]

As far as the frustration is concerned, a lot of people leave feedback because they still care about the game on some level. I'm not even playing the game at the moment - I just happened to make use of the free login campaign and that allowed me to post for the first time in months due to the...questionable decision to prevent players from leaving feedback if they haven't logged into the game within the last two weeks.

I've made threads in the past such as this one:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...epresentatives

Asking for more direct engagement, though like so many video game companies these days the only feedback taken on board seems to be that which will allow the developers to stick their maws into ESG funding troughs through pandering to the Twitter crowd and pretending as if 'influencers' are genuinely excited about the latest product they're promoting in order to receive financial benefit and social clout amongst their followers.

It's really bizarre that elements of this community pretend as if Yoshi-P is anything other than extremely distant and disconnected from regular, invested players. Even the Q&A sessions where players can put forward questions to the development team are heavily curated and even if a question is lucky enough to go through, half the time it isn't answered with any meaningful depth or is just dismissed with an outright joke.

To me, at least, it's perfectly understandable why so many around these parts have decided to be vocal in their frustration - and being a bit testy in tone does not equal losing sleep over something, either. The whole 'go play something else/quit' in response to any critical feedback is far from helpful. Save that for those so addicted to the game that they believe it to be perfect and any criticism whatsoever is taken as a deeply offensive personal attack.

[magitekLuna]

This expansion has been really lackluster in terms of patches, there is literally nothing to do, and most of the stuff added is a joke.

Yes and no.
As an mmo rpg it is as good as dead in the content we got in 6.x.
As a sims/imvu it's doing well. People use it as a chat and afk sim.
The real test will be 7.0

[VirusOnline]

It isn't an authentic stance for any business to embrace, though. The 'play other games' statement is in itself rooted in an interview as far back as the days of ARR when FFXIV was first finding its footing during its relaunch.

If not for the - quite frankly, creepy - cult that has formed around Yoshi-P it would never have been taken seriously. Interestingly, a lot of the people who echo it started the game years later and simply echo it without having been around themselves when it was first spoken.

I also don't think many people expect to be catered to 24/7 - there just isn't much in the way of content with staying power and depth, whereas when people do take breaks they're unable to leave feedback after two weeks of not logging in. Putting aside that this place doesn't have any real visible engagement from the community representatives in the first place...there's just a very unfortunate set of circumstances that have allowed the 'venue goers' to effectively hold the game hostage and move it further and further away from being an actual MMO rather than a strange Second Life clone.

To me, at least, it's perfectly understandable why so many around these parts have decided to be vocal in their frustration - and being a bit testy in tone does not equal losing sleep over something, either. The whole 'go play something else/quit' in response to any critical feedback is far from helpful. Save that for those so addicted to the game that they believe it to be perfect and any criticism whatsoever is taken as a deeply offensive personal attack.

Understandable on the authenticity part.
I probably should have noted that I was more focused on the phrase of "go play another game" as a player response to dissatisfaction rather than a response to critical feedback. But I'd like to think both converge on the same end message.

As someone that briefly played when the ARR primals were endgame, I wasn't aware of its origin. I have always rolled my eyes at the response in these forums. But it's been ten years since that interview. I'd like to think that words and phrases are allowed to be redefined. For me at least, the "go play something else" in these few recent months have come to mean something else: if I'm unhappy then I simply pay for something that is worth my time. On the other hand, if the owner of a company tells you to go buy something else if you're dissatisfied - inauthentic or not, helpful or not - why continue beating a dead horse ? A lot of this forum is just that. All you can do is leave your feedback and maybe things get better. These forums have had a sad decline in constructiveness and all around treating each other decently when it comes to serious matters. While I would like to argue the validity more, I don't have the patience to deal with the more aggressive/shock-value personalities in this thread so I'll simply leave it there.

[VeolE]

I dead ass won't even SUGAR COAT IT. This game has been mid as hell since ShB. Ever since the whole homogenization that started in ShB and the quality of the combat system has been a huge downfall. I dead ass stop playing DRK because it was so similar to WAR. I couldn't even play AST anymore because how they gutted the cards into a oblivion.

And the 2 minute meta? I don't understand how people enjoy THAT over diversity for gameplay. We traded in diversity / gameplay for this 2min / (boring) balance. And the only reason why i'm still here and sub to this game is because i'm FORCED to stay subbed in order to keep my FC housing.

And i'm confused on how the hell that people still have stuff to do on the game... despite having 8 years in it. Like bro, I played since STORMBLOOD my guy, and that's close to 5 years and there's ain't shit to do in this current expansion. I rather go back to the stormblood days, and at least most of the jobs were FUN and the content that shell out was good.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

And i'm confused on how the hell that people still have stuff to do on the game... despite having 8 years in it. Like bro, I played since STORMBLOOD my guy, and that's close to 5 years and there's ain't shit to do in this current expansion. I rather go back to the stormblood days, and at least most of the jobs were FUN and the content that shell out was good.

...Ive been here since HW and still have stuff to do.
Having nothing to do -vs- having nothing you WANT to do, are 2 completely different things.