Quote Originally Posted by strawberrycake View Post
battle devs expressed how they were afraid of feed back, and no not people being mean or horrid or crass, like, people genuinely being critical of their work.
I wouldn't blame them after some of the awful things I have read on this forum in the past. It would not be healthy for one's mental health to read some of things that have been said on a regular basis.

Constructive feedback is great and it can be done in a way that is polite and respectful of what they have done, of the work they have put in and of the challenges and difficulties involved in addressing their concerns. Many English speakers do not word it respectfully or polite, especially in the past. You know, like a reasonable human being.

And with a recent video that people having been talking about a lot, it shows how HW had arguably worse Design choices for the game.
Frankly, the ARR and Heavensward design was a "shot in the dark". They had no idea what they were doing back then. They were just throwing out things to see what worked.

For example, Monk was given Featherfoot, an ability that allowed them a significant chance of evading attacks entirely. This made sense from a lore perspective, but had no value in practice because Monk is not a tank and there's no need to dodge... a raid-wide AoE?

The entire job design was similar to that; it was all made from a lore perspective. Paladin had physical blocks, while Dark Knight had magic defense. This made sense from a lore perspective but when you put it into raids, some of it stuck and some of it just fell apart.

But with a smaller player count, there were less voices, less content creators (literally just MTQ, MrHappy, Xeno and barely anyone else) and it was just easier to hear about the problems and they all got addressed, with useless abilities being removed, cross-class becoming role actions so we didn't have to level multiple jobs and parry becoming Tenacity. Now there are hundreds of content creators, voices coming from everywhere with constrasting opinions, so looks like it would be hard to decide who to listen to now.

Prior to Patch 3.3 Revenge of the Horde, XIV had saw a massive fall off, content was seen as too hard, the game felt stagnant
I didn't see any issues on Balmung. But that's exactly the problem. We were restricted to worlds. If you weren't on a popular world like Balmung, then of course the game felt stagnant. That was why they worked hard to implement cross-world PF in the final tier of Heavensward.

Diadem introduced in 3.1 was failing and seen very poorly by the community. I feel this left a lasting imprint on the still fresh and fragile egos of the dev team, people will be harsh and honest, it is just a fact of life.
Like everything else, it was a shot in the dark. They discovered that making it hard to queue for and have no goal (such as a relic weapon) then nobody is going to do it, which led us to Eureka. I doubt they could have been confident anything would succeed back then. It was all a shot in the dark to see what works and what doesn't.

I feel these failures in HW has lead to the Design Philosophy shift in XIV to being an RPG you can play Solo or With Friends
No, it changed because they did a company survey of Final Fantasy players and they consistently saw that most people avoid the MMORPGs because they want to play them alone like all the rest. So their goal is obviously to allow them to play it alone, but while doing that they may end up having a conversation with someone or joining a Free Company and getting sucked into the social environment. That should be the plan because it's smart.

Yet the game is still marketed as an MMO to many New comers and Vet players alike.
I think that it is only players marketing it that way. Square Enix has always marketed it as "Final Fantasy XIV Online" which does not necessarily mean multiplayer.

you can ask, but we as the players must also know what you all want to do
That is the entire point of live letters, but Yoshi-P is also generous with the amount of interviews he does each year. It must be well over a hundred. It's over 60 interviews when he goes to events such the Media Tour and sometimes that many at events like Gamescom.