Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Circonflexe]

Assuming you're referring to my post, to be clear I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, I'm responding to people who responded to my positive post about the eyes. Everyone can like or dislike whatever they want.

To be more precise, you specifically asked for an example of where you can see the lighting in the eyes, which other people think is bad. You got the answer and - to paraphrase it - you simply responded to the example like 'nah, it's perfectly fine, that's how reality looks'. That is a very clear example of the fact that you didn't actually wanted an honest oppinion from anyone. It was just an opener to convince people of the allready set view.

Nevertheless, I didn't actually mean you specifically, but more the back and forth that you may be a part of, but there have been far more examples that are recurring in a similar way. It won't be long before the next person asks for examples, only to then simply negate them.

Clearly I'm not writing this as a personal thing of bad blood - it's just the same and the same that won't lead to any point. The day on wich all of us will say "oh right - the lighting looks really great, how couldn't I see this?!" probably will not come - same for the switch-side. Would just be awesome if we could respect eachothers oppinion without simply negate it.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

To add to Circonflexe's point, the great problem that is persistent with FFXIV and its official social platforms is that the only way to give feedback to the dev team is, as we're regularly reminded of in PLLs, through the forums. (or through a rare JP stream of Yoshida playing with some randos and answering 5 questions)
Regardless of the topic of this thread, looking at the state of the EN forums, we all know how well that's going.

Granted, I haven't played every other MMO or social game on the market, so I'm not aware of what the average practices are, but at the moment I play 2 free-to-play social games for which I haven't paid a cent, and I regularly receive surveys asking me what I think about the latest content, if I'm still engaged with the game, if I have any suggestions or complaints, etc. One of these games launched last December, and I think last week was the 6th survey we received.
6 surveys. In 4 months. And even outside those surveys there are still multiple other channels for me to convey any feedback I have.

In 8 years of FFXIV I received one (1) survey, maybe 2. The survey asked me what my favorite minion and mount was, so that they could display a very cute ranking of everyone's favorite minions and mounts for the 10 year anniversary PLL. That's it.
To add insult to injury, you need to have an active subscription to post on the forums, that is you have to pay to be able to give feedback.

And then when you arrive on the forums, the only official mean to communicate your requests to the dev team, your feedback is immediately torn to shreds by other players who feel the need to express their opinions on the matter. Not only is this adding oil to the trashfire that have become the forums, salt in the wounds of players who just want the dev team to consider their feedback and never asked for anyone else's opinion, and a general sense of nihilism and pessimism both in and outside the forums regarding the forums, but also, from a purely logistical point of view, it's making it impossible to accurately gather genuine and measurable player opinion.
How the hell is this supposed to work?

The EN forums have become a trashier version of Reddit, where people use clickbait titles to post yet another thread on Dawntrail's story or content or job balance when there's already more than 36 threads about it, drowning other threads that are making legitimate requests that have been completely ignored by the devs for 9 months.
Regarding the graphical update, the JP forums have had similar challenges, but thanks to a stronger etiquette and more present and active moderation they have at least managed to branch off and keep a "request" thread separate from a "discussion and opinions" thread (although we still don't know which thread the devs have been looking at).
Naturally this would have never worked on the EN forums for reasons mentioned above, and for having regularly invaded the JP forums since last April and looked at JP blogs and social media, I can say that they are just as disillusioned as us when it comes to the dev team paying attention to legitimate player feedback posted on the forums (like, they think the devs are listening to the EN forums, while we think the opposite).

It's just not working (except for the people who get a kick out of replying to every thread, or out of posting a new thread every day, it's going great for them).
And I've reached a point where I think that, while originally the forums were intended to work as a bridge between the dev team and the playerbase, now the latter has grown into something that SE is not capable of managing anymore and the forums' new purpose is to deter and act as a safeguard for players to dump their complaints, so everything negative is safely kept contained within the forums while they can keep advertising to new players without worrying about bad press.
That or Yoshida, who said something along the lines of "this goes against my philosophy, but I was left with no other choice" when introducing the long awaited and requested improvements to the blacklist and mute features (which have existed everywhere else for 10+ years), still genuinely believes that the forums are a place where players are capable of moderating each other and ⋆⟡₊⊹ freely exchange in the marketplace of ideas ⊹₊⟡⋆ to achieve a consensus in their feedback, which is equally worrying.

[Circonflexe]

I don't see this in here purely as an request to the dev team - it's also an ear to other players. Not only the ones with the same view.

How I wrote earlier I'm glad for those who like the update and told here about it - sadly those posts are mostly as an answer to the critics without any deeper detail about what exactly is great. Sometimes it seems like there allmost is no detail, what exactly is great - but that's surely just my feeling. I may not relate to it, but I could enjoy details about someone others view, without me having to tell them how awefull I think those folks characters are looking now. On the other hand I wouldn't want to hear that my character looks fine, when that's not my feeling. Shouldn't be that hard.

This is not about fighting eachothers view - at least it shouldn't.

[Turnintino]

Thank you for the example. I can see how that looks a little odd but I wouldn't say they look bad since that is to be expected depending on the eye color and different lighting conditions. The same thing happens in real life.

This particular image isn't comparable to OP's, which depicts a sheen over the entire eye of the NPC, obscuring the pupil, etc., making the eyes look like glass marbles. The details of the model's eyes are obscured, yes, but through a manipulation of contrast and exposure in what I can promise you is achieved through digital editing, typical of the kind of glamour photography this clearly is.

[CidHeiral]

To be more precise, you specifically asked for an example of where you can see the lighting in the eyes, which other people think is bad. You got the answer and - to paraphrase it - you simply responded to the example like 'nah, it's perfectly fine, that's how reality looks'. That is a very clear example of the fact that you didn't actually wanted an honest oppinion from anyone. It was just an opener to convince people of the allready set view.

I can't say I agree with your assessment. If someone were to tell me their outfit is ugly and I ask them to show me what they're talking about and upon seeing it I disagree that it's ugly, that doesn't mean I didn't actually want their opinion or I have some ulterior motives. I thanked that person for providing their screenshot and specifically said it's valid for them to have the opinion I disagree with. Characterizing the post as "nah it's fine git gud lol" is disingenuous.

Would just be awesome if we could respect eachothers oppinion without simply negate it.

I've gone out of my way to say "in my opinion," "your opinion is okay too," "thank you," etc etc. Not sure how much more respectful you're wanting things to be while still disagreeing. Should everyone only respond with "Message received" and leave it at that?

This particular image isn't comparable to OP's, which depicts a sheen over the entire eye of the NPC, obscuring the pupil, etc., making the eyes look like glass marbles. The details of the model's eyes are obscured, yes, but through a manipulation of contrast and exposure in what I can promise you is achieved through digital editing, typical of the kind of glamour photography this clearly is.

I think most people can understand what I was getting at without an exact match in lighting conditions. Obscured eyes happen under various conditions in reality and if the game is simulating light relatively realistically then it's to be expected that it happens in the game as well, in the same way we would expect a shadow to be cast behind us. That's not demanding the game be photorealistic, it's just how light works. If someone prefers a more hyper stylized approach then fair enough, I'm just voicing my opinion that I enjoy the current solution.

[Argantaelle]

Granted, I haven't played every other MMO or social game on the market, so I'm not aware of what the average practices are...

Unfortunately, this kind of silence is typical for large MMOs: surveys are very rare, and it's possible to miss them completely. I received only one survey in WoW (it was about the launch of WoW Classic when Blizzard was testing the waters) and no surveys whatsoever for GW2, SW:TOR, Rift, BnS, Aion, and other numerous Western or Korean MMOs I've played over the years. Even though I stopped playing many of them, I always keep an eye on a selected few, so my memories are more or less relevant.

I know, though, that GW2 might have some kind of hidden surveys when you have to sign an NDA to continue, but it might be just rumours. SW:TOR launched a survey about a year ago when they transitioned from Bioware to Broadsword, but I wasn't among the subscribers, so I didn't receive it.

On the other hand, GW2, SW:TOR, and ESO community managers and devs are quite active on forums or even on "official" subreddits and often give feedback or interesting insights. For example, ESO started a survey two or three weeks ago to collect feedback about disconnects and latency (the problems plaguing the game since the very beginning) and opened a fascinating thread on official forums asking players to share their pain points about the game (the ESO game director posted a comment in this thread, something like "We are listening and are going to do this and that to improve").

So, according to my experience, the lack of surveys is typical for large P2P or B2P MMOs, but the state of forums is not.

P.S. I did receive the one and only FFXIV survey with more or less serious questions (what you like about the game, what you value the most, what you would like to see improved, what features you think are missing from the game, etc.). This survey was held about 4 years ago (late Shadowbringers, if I remember correctly).

[Circonflexe]

I can't say I agree with your assessment. If someone were to tell me their outfit is ugly and I ask them to show me what they're talking about and upon seeing it I disagree that it's ugly, that doesn't mean I didn't actually want their opinion or I have some ulterior motives. I thanked that person for providing their screenshot and specifically said it's valid for them to have the opinion I disagree with. Characterizing the post as "nah it's fine git gud lol" is disingenuous.

I've gone out of my way to say "in my opinion," "your opinion is okay too," "thank you," etc etc. Not sure how much more respectful you're wanting things to be while still disagreeing. Should everyone only respond with "Message received" and leave it at that?

Honestly this leads to a hole different topic about empathy - sure you can handle it like that, but I wouldn't describe it as polite, if that person is sad about an outfit, that was in their eyes beautyfull looking by choosing it and is very different (negatively different in their oppinion) the other day. It gets nastier if I choosed the same outfit, that I now like more than before and tell the person how beautifull it is and how much an outfit _should_ look like this to be pretty, while she/he is very sad. That's not respectfull, that's sassy.

There are very different ways to talk about the topic - phrases like "in my oppinion" don't change the massage in any way. You could say very nasty things "in your oppinion" but it would stay nasty things.

This get very much out of topic but at some point it should get addressed.

edit: You're right that I paraphrased your post heavily, but actually I didn't do that to suggest a tone that would challenge your arguments, I chose that comparison because I wanted to clarify how (at least I) understood your post. I apologize if you didn't mean it in the sense of "nah it's fine git gud lol", but I still have no other interpretation for it, no matter how many times I read your original post.

[Circonflexe]

Back to the actual topic, I thought more carefully about the approach, whether there might be something to it that the new lighting of the eyes could be realistically correct and why it still doesn't look right.

I think it could be because the new lighting is not consistently realistic, but rather realistic approaches collide with completely unrealistic approaches. In this case, it is very specifically about the fact that this blurry cloud over the eyes simulates a kind of shadow and there are no highlights if the light source for it is missing. In fact, that is exactly what would happen in reality - but the point is that for this circumstance to happen in this striking way, there would actually have to be no light source in reality. So it would be dark - dark dark.

However, we don't have real darkness in the game, we only have the absence of what appears to be natural daylight or another lightsource. So I would say that the new lighting could actually look good - but in my opinion only if the realistic approach is actually fully implemented, which includes real darkness.

Would it overall look good, if we had real darkness? I don't know - could be possible that at that point our characters would look like puppets in a too realistic lighting - wich possibly is the point why some players liked the old lighting better that more matches the character style. Nonetheless could it be worth the try if it's purely for testing-purposes untill it get's anywhere good.

[CidHeiral]

Honestly this leads to a hole different topic about empathy - sure you can handle it like that, but I wouldn't describe it as polite, if that person is sad about an outfit, that was in their eyes beautyfull looking by choosing it and is very different (negatively different in their oppinion) the other day. It gets nastier if I choosed the same outfit, that I now like more than before and tell the person how beautifull it is and how much an outfit _should_ look like this to be pretty, while she/he is very sad. That's not respectfull, that's sassy.

There are very different ways to talk about the topic - phrases like "in my oppinion" don't change the massage in any way. You could say very nasty things "in your oppinion" but it would stay nasty things.

Your view seems to be that everyone should always agree with everyone else regardless of what they actually think just to avoid ruffling any feathers, which I would have to disagree with. We're on a discussion forum which by its nature is going to result in a mix of different opinions, but any stable adult should be able to discern between someone being nasty and someone simply not agreeing with them. As long as everyone is polite it's okay to disagree.

I apologize if you didn't mean it in the sense of "nah it's fine git gud lol", but I still have no other interpretation for it, no matter how many times I read your original post.

Not much I can do for you there unfortunately but I appreciate the apology.

[Circonflexe]

Your view seems to be that everyone should always agree with everyone else regardless of what they actually think just to avoid ruffling any feathers, which I would have to disagree with. We're on a discussion forum which by its nature is going to result in a mix of different opinions, but any stable adult should be able to discern between someone being nasty and someone simply not agreeing with them. As long as everyone is polite it's okay to disagree.

Oh wow, at this point you really wanted to misunderstand me, right? You don't have to agree with someone to take his view serious that you asked for Oo