Reddit vs. the Forums in the Graphics War of '24

[AnimaAnimus]

I wonder why the two have such different perspectives..

Because on Reddit you can be downvoted. And the redditors are not scared to instantly and dramatically downvote anyone who has any criticism, even if it's constructive, while sending reddit cares after you and even sometimes doxxing you. They literally cannot take anyone speaking ill of the game on those sites and will get super aggressive about how perfect this game is to them. Everyone I know avoids the FFXIV subreddits like the plague.

Reddit and Twitter are the reasons ffxiv players have a certain reputation in the mmo communities at large.

[PercibelTheren]

There might honestly be a disparity in the races they play? Every time I peek into the XIV sub, it's full of fanart that's just pictures of scantily clad catgirls. Catgirls in general seem to not have been hit as hard by the update as say, Au Ra.

[twobear]

One poll I saw on Reddit had hundreds of 'very happy' and 'pretty happy' responses vs less than 50 'really unhappy' (paraphrasing the responses here but that was the general vibe of them).

It basically does seem like the vast majority of people are happy with the update. And most people who are really happy aren't going to come to the forum and just shout about how happy they are.

[Bonoki]

I love it when you visit Twitter and you see someone crop a take or opinion that was found here, and they never directly reply to the post here on the forums but they do on Twitter, and it gets like 1000 more replies and updoots. Then you find the same post on the forums, a dead thread.

[Arkdra]

Housings biggest feedback from day 1 was “make it instanced” they have literally ignored the most common feedback about housing since day 1 and dance around it because they themselves have said they like the neighbourhood feeling, when was the last time someone praised the neighbourhood feeling of the houses

Same as tanks and healers, they had the same feedback in SB, “I don’t like losing damage to perform my core function and relying excessively on the party to help me achieve the core function. In response they nuked agro out of the tanks and designed healers like they are playing a different game and satisfaction crashed on those jobs going into ShB, yet they did not reverse course at all

At best they overcorrect in response to poorly constructed feedback then refuse to backtrack on the over correction at worst they just ignore feedback and implement their vision anyway. You also said “feedback to Kaiten wasn’t strong enough to reverse course. Was there a single shred of positive feedback on the Kaiten changes”, if there was why didn’t they mention it, all they said was “give it a try you might love it anyway”

Apartments are the compromise they came up with for instanced housing. You can think this sucks, and honestly, I would agree, but you can't say they ignored it.

You have 0 evidence that a satisfaction crash ever happened. You at best have anecdotal evidence that people on this forum have been posting angrily about it but this forum doesn't represent even 1% of the active playerbase. Regardless, your feedback has not been ignored, the 340 page thread named Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate" came about from him directly addressing healer feedback. In a way that you can find unsatisfactory if you are so inclined (and I'd also agree it's a shit answer), but it's not ignored.

[Supersnow845]

Apartments are the compromise they came up with for instanced housing. You can think this sucks, and honestly, I would agree, but you can't say they ignored it.

You have 0 evidence that a satisfaction crash ever happened. You at best have anecdotal evidence that people on this forum have been posting angrily about it but this forum doesn't represent even 1% of the active playerbase. Regardless, your feedback has not been ignored, the 340 page thread named Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate" came about from him directly addressing healer feedback. In a way that you can find unsatisfactory if you are so inclined (and I'd also agree it's a shit answer), but it's not ignored.

Would you prefer I link you the job satisfaction surveys going into 5.x that saw AST and SCH go from middle of the pack to last and second last and for DRK and WAR to crash near 10 spots each or does that also not count as evidence

Again it circles back to the point that people on the forum way too easily resort to “let’s just assume I’m right because there isn’t overwhelming evidence to the contrary”

And are you really going to argue that a shit compromise nobody actually likes counts as valid response to feedback rather than actually implementing the feedback

[posona]

Because this is the place for player feedback. We are literally asked by the devs to leave feedback here, and usually that’s what we would like to see improved.

[Neoyoshi]

Think of all the stuff we'd get done if we were actually in game instead of Reddit.

[Arkdra]

Would you prefer I link you the job satisfaction surveys going into 5.x that saw AST and SCH go from middle of the pack to last and second last and for DRK and WAR to crash near 10 spots each or does that also not count as evidence

Again it circles back to the point that people on the forum way too easily resort to “let’s just assume I’m right because there isn’t overwhelming evidence to the contrary”

And are you really going to argue that a shit compromise nobody actually likes counts as valid response to feedback rather than actually implementing the feedback

Yeah, post the surveys. lmao at trying to be disparaging towards needing actual evidence for things, that's classic official forum posting right there. Like my anecdotal evidence is I play a dps and if tanks and healers vanished my queue time would be insufferable. But they are better now than they were prior to shb so you're going to need to give me some hard data. Preferably something more recent than some survey from 5.x but I will take what you got.

And yeah, they listened to the feedback and implemented a change based on it and have continued to implement more and more stuff as time has gone on to try and appease the playerbase with regards to housing because they value the non-instanced experience for... some insane reason. I don't get it either. I've owned a house since they let individuals buy them and I have had 0 experiences with anyone else in my wards. Other than being furious at the guy with a dozen namazu statues in their yard making a racket and making my local auction board basically unusable.

I'd bet money on they don't want to pay for that and don't want to deal with the blowback from outright saying it, if I had to guess.

[Loggos]

I wanted to write down one or two thoughts on why I think reddit's way of presenting and engaging with content leads to a different way of approaching things but then it spiraled out of control so I'm putting it under the spoiler tag to not bury others under a wall of text.

Anyway, here is my convoluted pseudo-psychological explanation why I think people on reddit and twitter seem so different in their opinions.

I think reddit also fosters a different kind of mentality because it's a lot more fast-paced in its way to handle threads and not really like a forum (at least the subreddit main page isn’t) where threads with activity get pushed to the top no matter how old they are. Plus you cannot put images in your replies in the way you can do it here.

Here we can argue very thoroughly in the same thread for days (a blessing, a curse, you decide) so discussions on the same thing go on longer.

This can either result in talking in circles of course, but when it goes well it also means a topic can be elaborated and explored in a lot more detail.

Also, to my knowledge being able to illustrate your standpoint or counter arguments with images in an ongoing thread isn't really a thing on reddit.

You can reply with walls of texts but since the topic of the graphical update in particular really benefits from visual examples you can't really go into a reddit thread that opens with an image and point out how you view it differently with counter images (e.g., by showing your analysis or by drawing over the OP's image etc.).

You'd have to make a new reddit post for that which would lead to lots of disjointed discussions.

Here, despite the chaos on the English forum, you can still make collection threads and compile lots of visual examples in one place. It's not as good as on the Japanese side but I do think the general race-based collection threads like the one for viera or au ra do a good job to illustrate certain problems consistently and to direct players to one place/a few places to voice their concerns (again, not perfect; I know lots of people also make their own threads).

I think this has led to a lot more thorough visual analyses on here than on reddit.
Imo the posting style does influence how you perceive certain things because had I not gone to the forums I would not have realised why I'm rather unhappy with many aspects of the benchmark as a whole.

I only saw that I didn't like the way my char looked and could point out why but seeing it happen to so many people and reading through many of the detailed diagrams and breakdowns really led to lots of "aha" moments I would have missed had I only stayed on reddit.

So reddit, despite being better than Twitter still fosters more of a shallow "scroll down" type of engagement with content.

Whereas "old-school" forums are not feed-based but activity based, leading (me, at least) to a completely different way of taking its info in.

It slows down. I think about it more. I don't have this (semi-unconscious) habit or expectation to constantly scroll down and see something new that demands attention in its own right. I spread the limited attention I have across a lot more topics within the same time span without investing too much in any single one of them.

Sure, right now the forum is on fire too and there are lots of threads happening at the same time but I still frequent the same threads over and over to see how they evolve. I just don't really do that on reddit tbh. (But perhaps that's just me.)

A feed that is constantly updated chronologically (or algo based) also makes it harder to go back to interesting things you saw before. With a forum it's not perfect but you can always make things relevant again. Nothing is really lost in the void of the feed.

(And as other people already mentioned, another problem is that if people downvote you too much your post becomes hidden unless someone actively clicks to look at it. So you can make critical voices invisible really easily.)

That's my convoluted pseudo-psychological explanation.

One of their latest benchmark threads discusses the lighting as the main source of character changes and there’s barely any *discussion*, as in a back and forth of proper arguments, taking place. There were a handful of people who posted links to examples of data miners showing how things were clearly remodeled beyond lighting and people didn't really engaged with that.

Mostly it’s just agreeing, insinuating that critical voices must be as a whole too dense to consider to check the lighting and so forth.

As forum-y as the forum can be, I appreciate the direct exchanges regarding the benchmark on here a lot more than on reddit, even the disagreements.

On reddit many people have just…decided it seems that people on the forum have no arguments and just whine, completely ignoring (or being unaware of) the wide range of detailed and neutral analyses, especially on the Japanese side. Since they don't see any of that (or ignore it purposefully, I don't know) they can just walk away without having their assumptions corrected and call it a day.