Square obviously not listening to feedback

[Zolvolt]

As someone who works with customers in software development, my experience is that you get a lot of opinions and suggestions from people. I think the problem is that you ask for feedback and customers give you suggestions when you really just want to know what they're pain points are. That's because users aren't typically great designers (UI, UX, job, functionality, etc.).

I figure SE is listening to our pain points and either acting on it as soon as they can, trying to figure out competing pain points (e.g., jobs are too clunky vs. jobs are too simple), and integrating them into their longer-term plans (e.g., 8.0).

Also, response to feedback has to be prioritized. So, an individual's or several individual's particular feedback may be actionable but is considered to be less priority than the stuff they did do. We don't know why they waited to incorporate specific feedback and we will likely never know.

Also, while developers and product managers aspire to be above it, being a jerk with your feedback tends to make them not want to address it. The people working on this are people, too.

Dear lord can you please say this louder for those in the back. If everyone read and undestood this one post the forums here would be a better place for discussion and a large amount of the hostility would be gone.

edit:::

A big part of feedback though is also transparency which is currently not being shown in an adequate way

Let’s use the Kaiten example

The devs deleted kaiten with functionally zero reason other than their stated reason of “action bloat”, they then specifically went on record saying “give it a try and give us feedback”. The community on both the JP and EN forums came together and overwhelmingly said “this is a bad idea” to the point EN has a megathread compiling megathreads on feedback to the Kaiten change

We did exactly what they asked us to do in regards to a change and then they have proceeded to literally never mention Kaiten again

What are we supposed to take from this interaction other than “give it a try and give us feedback” is basically a fancy way of saying “just accept the changes”. There was absolutely zero transparency with the way they handled Kaiten and this is leading people to not trust them and think they aren’t responding to any feedback at all. They are also cryptically opaque about the healer changes and a host of other issues

I reached the post limit but I just want to posit this idea out there. They told you that they removed kaiten because of action bloat. Thats the reason they gave. That tells me that they made a change, gave you a reason for it, and is it not possible that you just aren't happy with their answer? Saying action bloat is very transparent. What wouldn't be transparent is if they said nothing and just removed it like they do in other games. I'd also add that even with all the feedback in the world they aren't guaranteed to do what you want. Knowing the level of care they put into this game, do you truely believe that they did not try a version of EW sam with kaiten still before coming to this decision? I guarantee you they did. But at the end of the day they made a call, for the reason they gave, and if they believe the game is better of with that call then thats their decision to make. It really isn't about a lack of transparency. But again, just something to think about.

[Arkdra]

[B]why kaiten gone...

I personally flew to Japan and asked Yoshi P to remove kaiten and he did.

[Supersnow845]

Dear lord can you please say this louder for those in the back. If everyone read and undestood this one post the forums here would be a better place for discussion and a large amount of the hostility would be gone.

A big part of feedback though is also transparency which is currently not being shown in an adequate way

Let’s use the Kaiten example

The devs deleted kaiten with functionally zero reason other than their stated reason of “action bloat”, they then specifically went on record saying “give it a try and give us feedback”. The community on both the JP and EN forums came together and overwhelmingly said “this is a bad idea” to the point EN has a megathread compiling megathreads on feedback to the Kaiten change

We did exactly what they asked us to do in regards to a change and then they have proceeded to literally never mention Kaiten again

What are we supposed to take from this interaction other than “give it a try and give us feedback” is basically a fancy way of saying “just accept the changes”. There was absolutely zero transparency with the way they handled Kaiten and this is leading people to not trust them and think they aren’t responding to any feedback at all. They are also cryptically opaque about the healer changes and a host of other issues

[Supersnow845]

Dear lord can you please say this louder for those in the back. If everyone read and undestood this one post the forums here would be a better place for discussion and a large amount of the hostility would be gone.

edit:::


I reached the post limit but I just want to posit this idea out there. They told you that they removed kaiten because of action bloat. Thats the reason they gave. That tells me that they made a change, gave you a reason for it, and is it not possible that you just aren't happy with their answer? Saying action bloat is very transparent. What wouldn't be transparent is if they said nothing and just removed it like they do in other games. I'd also add that even with all the feedback in the world they aren't guaranteed to do what you want. Knowing the level of care they put into this game, do you truely believe that they did not try a version of EW sam with kaiten still before coming to this decision? I guarantee you they did. But at the end of the day they made a call, for the reason they gave, and if they believe the game is better of with that call then thats their decision to make. It really isn't about a lack of transparency. But again, just something to think about.

EW SAM launched with Kaiten so I’m not sure where you are getting that point from

My point is “if they were happy with the change and the stated reason means they are transparent” (paraphrasing you) why did they ask for feedback and act as if our feedback meant anything. If they were rock solid on the change and were not going to relent then “please give us feedback” just reads as “kick rocks”

[Arkdra]

EW SAM launched with Kaiten so I’m not sure where you are getting that point from

My point is “if they were happy with the change and the stated reason means they are transparent” (paraphrasing you) why did they ask for feedback and act as if our feedback meant anything. If they were rock solid on the change and were not going to relent then “please give us feedback” just reads as “kick rocks”

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Zarkovitch]

They do it's selective feedback.