Square obviously not listening to feedback

[Sjol]

It's inexplicable to be honest. The most likely answer is that the blowback wasn't enough to get them to change their mind. Like go back and look through some of that bring back kaiten thread. Yeah, it's a big thread. If the first 10 pages are anything to go by then more than half of that thread is the same 20ish posters (I just eyeballed it I did not do a hard count). 30% of it might be just celesticerr and ryuzooo lol.

But then, if the blowback wasn't enough to reverse the kaiten decision, why did they back off the 6.2 adjustments for drg and specifically cite the kaiten blowback as the reason? The blowback was not enough to get kaiten back but it was enough to get them to start adding intent notes on the job actions pages every time they make a change? Weird reaction on the whole, even if it all worked out to my benefit.

I think they realized that smaller adjustments wouldn't be well-recieved and instead decided that larger adjustments should be taken together. I'm personally a fan of kaiten's removal. I don't speak up much about it, because A) I got what I wanted and B) merely mentioning it would invite argument.

[Sjol]

The FFXIV team also isn't a monolith, nor are decisions made lightly or in a vacuum. I wanted to give a little context. For background, I'm a developer who has worked in both consumer-facing products and for a Japanese company, though I'm not in either on at the moment.

You'll likely have a community team or teams that read forums and get a general sense of the sentiment and compile that feedback giving it back to someone in product development and design. It's going to be highly compressed because it has to be because of time constraints. Designers are busy doing design and don't have hours upon hours to read the forums.

Designers will likely have a head of design. There may be a hierarchy of leadership, but I would imagine there's less than a dozen job designers on staff. Design, product and technical leadership will determine the broad strokes of where they want the product to go. These conversations will have been over months or years to arrive at their current strategy. Roadmaps will have been created from these strategic goals.

Product Managers/Owners (orgs have different names) will be responsible for what work is prioritized on the dev side in coordination with other departments. You can't code up new job abilities without designs and assets, though placeholders will often be used.

The person who designs the job probably plays it but not extensively. The design skillset and the player skillset are different but overlapping skillsets. Remember the designer has to work from theory a lot of the time because the job as imagined doesn't exist yet and experimentation is slow.

Once the job is in a playable state, testers will test it and the designer may play around with it. Testers will mostly be looking for bugs, though. The developers who coded up the new abilities may give initial feedback to it feeling clunky, but they might even play the game.

Between when the job design and coding, it may be months before the design sees something actually playable. The exception is potency changes and deletions as neither requires coding or asset creation. Both can be tweaked with metadata changes alone, and likely have a much faster turnaround time. The exception to the exception would be quest-given abilities.

In order to make significant job adjustments, it's going to take weeks to months depending on how many dependencies are created in terms of assets, coding, etc. E.g., removing Kaiten may have been something they wanted to do for a while, but replacing it with something else would take a long time.

Between the feedback process and the implementation of something new is multiple people, months of effort, and shifting priorities. It's not uncommon for something extremely important to get lost in all that. And SE isn't alone in that. Just because there's not instant turnaround doesn't mean feedback isn't being listened to. Sometimes it just needs to work itself through the system.

[Zolvolt]

<snip>

I wish I was as good at putting my thoughts down on paper as you are. Excellently well said. Perspective is everything when considering how developers come to the choices they do.

[MagiusNecros]

I think all the feedback they listen to is game data they collect, within their staff and probably corporate. That's it. And maybe big name influencers/streamers that market their game.

It's been quite a trip to just watch Yoshi P be like:

Yoshi P: I've made my game stress free and boring to play. I should make it more challenging. Maybe I should remove the 2 min meta?

Also Yoshi P: Simplifies job design and engagement even more for Dawntrail. Imma double down on keeping the 2 min meta.

[justausername]

two of the first things you learn when you take a job in any customer facing job are 'you can't please everyone', and 'people who have bad things to say are 99% more likely to actually say something then people who are content with things as they are'.
The fact is is that the feedback here and on other social media is all doom posting, and doesn't reflect a large portion of the player base. Most people are fine with the way things are.
If they aren't, the reason they still don't say anything is because these forums, twitter, reddit, are all filled with toxic people who don't know how to take no for an answer, and take every little change they make to the game that isn't what they want as a personal attack.

[Supersnow845]

two of the first things you learn when you take a job in any customer facing job are 'you can't please everyone', and 'people who have bad things to say are 99% more likely to actually say something then people who are content with things as they are'.
The fact is is that the feedback here and on other social media is all doom posting, and doesn't reflect a large portion of the player base. Most people are fine with the way things are.
If they aren't, the reason they still don't say anything is because these forums, twitter, reddit, are all filled with toxic people who don't know how to take no for an answer, and take every little change they make to the game that isn't what they want as a personal attack.

What’s the point of feedback as an concept if every piece of feedback can be deflected as “the majority of people aren’t complaining so they must be happy”

[Aravell]

What’s the point of feedback as an concept if every piece of feedback can be deflected as “the majority of people aren’t complaining so they must be happy”

It never fails that somebody always jumps to the "but the silent majority" argument, even though it's flawed as heck as an argument.

There's a reason we call the majority "silent", unless you personally interview all of them, you can't lump them into the same group. The community is not a hive mind.

[ThorneDynasty]

It never fails that somebody always jumps to the "but the silent majority" argument, even though it's flawed as heck as an argument.

There's a reason we call the majority "silent", unless you personally interview all of them, you can't lump them into the same group. The community is not a hive mind.

Also, complete lack of self-awareness of "you don't speak for the majority" immediately followed with "actually the majority of people think..." every time. Rather than just engaging the argument/criticism.

[Valence]

And even then, does it mean that the minorities should just stay quiet and eat the crow? Not giving a single care to any negative feedback doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do on the long run to me

[Sjol]

And even then, does it mean that the minorities should just stay quiet and eat the crow? Not giving a single care to any negative feedback doesn't sound like the smartest thing to do on the long run to me

They likely have many avenues where feedback comes in:

* internal testers
* other designers
* streamers
* random surveys
* forums
* reddit
* google trends
* NPS surveys

It's a bit of distance from saying, "hey, they might not have chosen your feedback over other feedback" to "SE doesn't listen to me and is forcing me to eat crow." There's a difference between not listening to your feedback and not acting on your feedback the way you want.

There are so many factors that go into how a large organization operates. Feedback is useful, but expecting any one particular idea to be acted upon is unrealistic.