Genuine Question for Frequent Negative Posters

[Shurrikhan]

I have yet to see any actual proof of there being this hidden alt army. Just feels like baseless conspiracy nonsense. "Clearly this many people can't disagree with me! They must all the the same person!"

Aye, there is no hidden alt army -- just a couple posters who like putting up the posts that are occasionally considered incendiary enough to give them forum vacations and/or post too often for the daily limits, at which point they rotate to an alt account.

I've yet to see more than 2 of their accounts active at the same time, and there's no appearance of either inflating their like counts noticeably off their alt accounts alone.

Tbf, though, it's also not the only excuse used to dismiss any disagreement. "You're all DPS mains in disguise, working per some conspiracy" / "You're all actually elitists, with some oligarchical agenda," and "You're all just a vocal minority anyways" all worked fine even pre-Titanmen.

[Jojoya]

Seriously, I don't even know where people get the idea that 7.0 is going to fix or even partially fix the problems with this game, it's not just one or two people, it's like the majority of the playerbase.

If you don't like the game at all, unironically save yourself the money and quit now because at this point this game is irredeemable. There's literally no point in waiting for 7.0 to fix anything. Spoiler: they won't. Only reason to stick to this game is for secondary, non-game purposes.

It depends on what the individual player sees as problems.

A lot of players don't see any problems. Of course they're excited for Dawntrail, it's a new expansion.

Other players only see as the lack of a new exploration zone this expansion as a problem. YoshiP said the developers are working on ideas for a new exploration zone in Dawntrail. That solves the problem for those players (as long as one gets released).

Job design is a mystery at this point since they usually don't announce vague details until the JP FanFest and wait until the media tour to go more in depth. It feels like some players think it can't get worse and so whatever changes are made in Dawntrail will be an improvement.

What are the problems you see with the game that you feel won't be addressed in Dawntrail?

Keep in mind that the NA FanFest is what it has traditionally been - a big teaser. EU adds in some more teasers with a little bit of specific information (one of the two jobs will be announced, we'll probably get concept art for 2-3 dungeons, etc.). JP FanFest is when the big picture comes together.

A lot of companies have policies for devs not to directly interact with players. Nothing good comes of it in communities as toxic as this one. If I was a dev and saw how people act here I’d stay far away. When people are rude and entitled they aren’t owned the devs time.

Yet not everyone is rude and entitled.

I'm in the group of those who think the developers should be spending their time actually working on the game rather than spending their time reading/listening to player feedback and replying directly to them. But the developers aren't the only staff working for the game.

The Community Managers have traditionally been the link between players and developers in most games. Getting the occasional "we've been watching the feedback in this thread and passing it onto the developers. We've made a special note of X problem that was mentioned" even when they can't give us specific answers is helpful.

Silence only adds to player frustration. The more frustration experienced, the more likely one is to become hostile.

I'm not going to accuse the Community Team of not doing their job because I don't have access to their job descriptions. But it would be nice if SE had them engaging with community regarding feedback instead of just using them as a PR/marketing tool on social media and through the stream events, and writing Lodestone topics.

Knowing the feedback has been seen and forwarded would help.

(edit: to add in it would be nice they also posted translations of some of the JP publication interviews on Lodestone. It's rough when we're relying on other members of the player community to get information. It looks bad on the game.)

I don't really agree with the notion that all feedback needs to be constructive to be valuable. Sentiment is still pretty valuable on its own, and it's frequently going to be the role of the professional to contextualize customer sentiment, positive or negative.

Isn't that the sort of attitude that's causing problems in the service industries right now? "It's your job so suck it up and deal". Turns out human beings are tired of being told that.

More and more businesses are starting to realize that no, the customer doesn't always have to be right and especially not when they're being hostile to people simply trying to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Many are more likely to start cutting ties to those customers than serving them.

You don't need to use expletives and personal attacks to express sentiment. "I feel frustrated" is a lot more likely to garner a response than "You are garbage and should be fired".

If the lack of response to player feedback is starting to get bad on all sides, then definitely it's time that SE take a closer look at what they have the Community teams doing.