The Devs Listen to Us

[FlutterYuu]

Healers have been this way since ShB launch, or arguably Stormblood if you take into account the unnecessary heal bloat that they've been getting that runs contrary to the amount of healing the game actually requires... Yoshida asked for SAM players feedback on the Kaiten changes, and not a word has been heard about that since. Nothing has been said about the gutting of healers in 5.0 outside of Yoshida saying "We know there are some of you who like 3.X era job design, but we're never going back to that." which doesn't even really address the issues people have with healers. When you think about it, half a decade is a long time to go with near radio silence.

Tbh I'm one of those people who like the 3.X era of job design. It is a very long time to be near radio silent. I don't refute that. And it does feel like they won't listen to us. But I'm sure they are. Maybe they can't respond for one reason or another. But the Devs can be trusted. The game wouldn't be where it is if they ignored us at every turn. PvP is more playable then ever, and that's because they listened. The SMN rework, though many may not like it, has been a good change. I love the Healer jobs and I do hate that Yoshi-P thinks all we should do is heal.

But tbh I can't be negative when SMN is right there, its job identity feels so on point, when I play it I feel like a Summoner. Maybe if we think about what we want out of each healer they'll rework them for the better. Make better changes. I know that sounds overly optimistic but reading your post made me think. We aren't ever going to get 3.X Healers back, but maybe we don't need them back. Maybe we can think about what we want our jobs to feel like. Maybe they'll listen then. We shouldn't have to post in a way that will make them listen, but if we want change we have to play by their rules. I know I don't want healers to only heal its super boring. And if that means we have to change how we think about things to get what we want then we should do just that.

[Heroman3003]

Fact is, devs are listening, and anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is on real copium here. The thing is, they don't listen to disproportionally loud forum demands on either the "I love my game!" or "Everything is ruined, worst expansion" side of spectrum. They listen to metrics and statistics gathered automatically. And I am 100% certain that all those statistics are telling them that the game has hit a bit of a small lull, but is otherwise doing great. Look at general development cycle and results and you'll see why. They ditched main 'hardcore mmo' elements when rebooting game as ARR and it was a big success. They cleaned up and streamlined a lot of things in HW, and it was a huge success. They didn't go too much further on that in Stormblood, and it was met somewhat more lukewarm than HW. Then they did Shadowbringers, with all its simplifications and drastic streamlining, which brought all the 'terrible game design issues' people are only noticing now in Endwalker patch cycle for some reason; and result of that was explosion of popularity so huge, they had to dedicate a great amount of resources just getting more servers up and running. And Endwalker then did all the same things Shadowbringers did, although lacking in few patch cycle featurues that ultimately probably just got cut because development is being focused on bigger things of the future, rather than crunching on current content. And guess what, Endwalker was just as much a success as ShB. It doesn't matter if 'true fans' or 'real mmo players' are quitting, and it doesn't matter if forums are drowned in negative feedback, because the feedback that ACTUALLY MATTERS, the general, wider audience perception and the metrics on sub and player numbers are telling the dev team that they're doing amazing job. No amount of positive or negative forum posts is going to affect that either way as things are.

My personal belief is that lack of content is mix of things. One, Endwalker seems to be treated as catch-up expansion. All resources went into 6.0 story as, just as ShB late patches had been affected by Covid, so was EW development. And I do believe, that they just decided to do less this time around as way to 'catch up' development wise by time next expansion is around, so it can have full feature complete state. While also giving players room to catch up on countless older things to do in the game without new content being too overbearing. Again, some will call it copium, I believe its just a reasonable belief by just looking at the development history of the game.

[FlutterYuu]

1) They're not saying that he doesn't want the position anymore, just that he's "checked out." Checking out usually means that his focus is elsewhere, to put it as mildly and politely as possible.
2) This is his job. He's not going to just stop taking a paycheck because "he doesn't feel like doing it anymore." He may be in a very good position to do so, but more money means more rings for his fingers and toes, and why would he leave a position where he's constantly earning accolades (which probably also come with bonuses and company-granted cash prizes) on behalf of his teams and things he barely has a hand in?

This isn't an American company. I know Square has been the... how do I say this politely? They've been very dumb. They've been very very dumb. But this isn't an American Corporation. This is a Japanese company. The same CEO, who stepped down this year, who wanted NFTs was the same CEO who cut their pay and apologized for the disastrous launch of FFXIV 1.0. I know where we're from our CEOs would never even think about doing something like that. The people in power in our countries would never "just leave" if they still get money. But these are not the same people. They don't have the same beliefs that our countries do. I think thinking of them the same way does the a huge disservice.

And I'm fully aware just because they're Japanese doesn't mean that they won't act the same way. Looking at you Konami!

Yoshi-P has been developing FFXVI, which is amazing btw, but thats done now. If things don't get better, you can say I told you so, but I think now that the team is whole again things can get better. Plus they just got new staff from Luminous Productions. I don't wanna talk about why I'm just acknowledging that they did get more staff to help out with development with their games, aka FFXIV!

[AwesomeJr44]

This thread has so much copium that I might overdose just by reading it.

[MintnHoney]

This isn't an American company.

I knew you were going to come at me with a "he's Japanese, so he's honorable by genetic default" type of argument. I really should have left that last sentence in my original post.

[FlutterYuu]

They do listen, but the question is where they listen and what they listen to. The argument is they don't pay much attention to the English forums.

They used to listen to things about job complexity and uniqueness, but they admitted themselves in a live letter in the last few years that they listen to veteran players too much when the majority of people are casual (forums mostly contain veteran players, so that means they listen to the forums too much). At that time you could already see the trend of greater focus on casual players who haven't taken the time to understand abilities very well.

You have to understand that the community used to be far smaller - 300,000 active characters. Now we are well over a million actively subscribed at any given time.

A larger community means more voices. With such a cacophony of voices in the community now, it is much harder to please everyone as well so they have to try harder to identify feedback amongst all the voices.

Development takes months or years. The complaints on these forums are mostly saying things that have been an issue for years and are complaints that were being provided years ago as well. They have had time to take it on board.

Did you come here from MrHappy's video?

Nobody is saying fix it right now. They know it can't be. They are saying for 7.0. But they already committed to it by changing PLD. What are they going to do, change PLD back suddenly?

Even though they are Japanese and we write in English?

I.. I don't know what to say to this. You just commented about MrHappy like it was nothing. I'm just kind of taken back. Like you know they do English interviews right? Like they have translators? Honestly speaking why would they have an English forums if they had no plans on reading them? Like they've posted in English Forums before its not like its never happened. I get being frustrated but this is on a whole other level, friend.

[FlutterYuu]

I knew you were going to come at me with a "he's Japanese, so he's honorable by genetic default" type of argument. I really should have left that last sentence in my original post.

I literally said just because he's Japanese doesn't mean he can't act like like Bobby Kotick. Like just because Square is Japanese doesn't mean that they're automatically honorable or except from criticism. Yoshi-P has not done anything that would make me think he's in it purely for the money. And its not because he's Japanese.

[remiff]

I did have to look up if PS4 will be dropped for 7.0. It is staying fortunately! Now I wonder where I heard that the support will drop for 7.0? Well I'm sure the graphical upgrade will look fantastic when it comes in 7.0.

The ps4 remains for 7.0 but will not benefit from the graphic update, because it is already announced in the form of a texture pack that can be activated in the pc/ps5,
but ps4 will certainly benefit from changes in light/shadow technology and certainly DX12 but no info before July 28th.

[Elkanah]

I hope I don't sound preachy but I think there are too many people who think the Devs don't listen. I'm not a very important person but I do think we need to remind ourselves that the FFXIV Dev Team listen to us, they always have.

It's been known since Heavensward that they're hearing what we say. Doing absolutely nothing with the information is what they actually do.

Maybe changes aren't happening as fast as we'd like them to. I do admit the Healers have been in a bad place for over a year. AST is the worst example of this, but they all have their issues. V&C Dungeons are also lackluster and many people run them once and leave.

Bad place over a year? Try since well before Stormblood?? Enough that a chunk of the community has stopped healing because Devs continue to give healers the middle finger. Yoshi-P came out and said it himself, before ignoring healers. Better yet, during a live letter, he SPECIFICALLY said they're not sure what they can do about healer (which is the reason why healers have been getting the gobshite end of the stick for a long time now).

With FFXIV leaving PS4 next expansion, they're upgrading graphics and improving the game under the hood for 7.0. Unfortunately that means that a lot of our issues won't be solved.

So back to where we started-- where none of the issues and ongoing problems that have been reported over several occasions will be solved, got it. I mean, it's not like they've been complained about awhile? What's an additional expansions worth of problems that pissed people off during Endwalker? What else could go wrong?

I think there should be a Daily V&C Roulette. Too keep that part of the game active. I don't know how fast they could make a change like this, I'm no game dev after all. But it could be a quick fix as they make the rewards of V&C Dungeons better.

Unless cheating was involved (or world race involvement), they don't have time to care enough to change it asap. They'll change it when we're near the end of the cycle of the current expansion, cause they don't see it as priority. Remember when a NIN went into PVP and was able to use the bottles to debuff the boss for Warring triad (EX) fights? Yeah, that's about the time they will actually change anything. Again-- if it's not absolutely game breaking or cheating of some kind behind a 3PT, it's not important enough to warrant attention unless it's making things easier for players to bypass.

Unfortunately Healers won't be fixed until 7.0 at the very least. Also the 2 minute meta won't be fixed until then either as pretty much all of the Endwalker Content is made with the 2 minute buff window in mind.

Healers wont be fixed, period. We'll probably have this same amount of bs that we had at every fanfest and every questionnaire that pops up. Devs will say "well, we're not sure what else to do with healers. So we won't really be changing anything. If you're so concerned about healer issues, you should just play Ultimates or go play something else for now and come back when there's more to do!". I almost guarantee it.

All we can do as a community is voice our displeasure. I'm sure the FFXIV Devs are reading these forums and I know it must be such a drag to read the same posts again and again. But I'm sure they're going to read these posts.

The only ones who read the forums at this point-- are the tech support team about some type of glitches or "known issues".

I'm not saying don't make your voices known. In fact make more posts. Brainstorm how they can change things for the better.

Still waiting on devs to fix Vierra and Hrothgar hats. But apparently only the mod teams will actually do the jobs that the devs dont want to do. I doubt that'll ever change. Just makes the dev team look much worse every time players fix their issues. Maybe they should start hiring better devs from the community??

As a community we should make sure not to exclude "non meta" jobs from high level content if it can be done with those jobs. I think maybe we scared them by doing such things; though those things I know are far and few in-between in my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I know that there is a reason why they can't make changes as fast as they might have used to.Also FFXVI is out so hopefully, the man power to make that game returns to FFXIV.

Squeenix will just give the XVI dev team more work to do, or move those folks over to their next project. Cause why bother with FFXIV changes when you had so many people buying XVI that it makes it more efficient to just move them to the next project? They've been doing it for years during XI, and then again when FFXIV re-released under 2.0: A Realm Reborn and all the expansions after that. That motto with Squeenix will most likely never change. Squeenix is a revolving door of opportunities (apparently enough for NFTs to still be a thing). ]

I love XIV, no matter how much I might bish and complain about it. However--(as a 1.0 player) like the WoW players-- it's just copium at this point.

[FlutterYuu]

The ps4 remains for 7.0 but will not benefit from the graphic update, because it is already announced in the form of a texture pack that can be activated in the pc/ps5,
but ps4 will certainly benefit from changes in light/shadow technology and certainly DX12 but no info before July 28th.

yeah i figured. I'm excited to learn more at this years fanfest tho!