Today's Discourse is Evidence That the Devs Need to Communicate More Intentionally

[Sierra291]

Like others, I've been swept up in the discourse following the posting of the Job Changes update today. It's extremely bizarre to me how this happens every time, and you'd think that after 10+ years of communicating with this player base, the dev team would learn a very simple fact: Specifics matter in these posts, a lot.

A lot of people have grown attached to Viper very quickly, myself included, and the vagueness of the post today regarding the changes planned for the job has left many in a tailspin about the future of the Job. How far are they going to go? How will it change?

When you say something as vague and non-commital as "... we’ve received feedback pertaining to the busyness of their skill rotation. To that end, we’re planning several improvements, including the easing of directional requirements, and changes to the effects of several actions. We’re aiming to implement these changes..." you leave a lot of room for people to immediately assume the worst; and like it or not, without the guard rails the specificity provides, people will ALWAYS assume the worst.

As a result, the discourse surrounding the Job and these proposed changes has become insanely toxic and reductive, to the point where people are essentially just assuming that it's going to be completely gutted. We could avoid all of this by posting at least the ideation or philosophy that you hope to approach with the planned changes.

By just aiming to address "busyness" you're failing to indicate what part of the actual gameplay loop needs addressing. Are you removing positional requirements? Are you removing oGCDs? Are you removing the double-weaves on Dreadwinder?

We simply don't know, because you didn't tell us.

I understand that some of the changes are probably still being tested, so they can't give out exact specifics, but in that case, they should really just give a boiler-plate statement that simply acknowledges that they've received feedback on aspects of the job and are looking and where they can make changes. By specifying an overarching conceptual identity of a job (Busyness/fast melee) and saying "We want to change that" you're literally throwing a bomb into a dark room with your eyes closed as far as the community is concerned.

Communication needs to be clear, concise, and specific. If it can't be any of those things, it should be delayed until it can, and a simple "We heard you, we're looking at it" should be given.

[gllt]

This is something I got used to in fighting games that thankfully ArcSys and French Bread have been getting much much better at.

But it's historically fun to parody useless patch note language with lines like "move adjusted to facilitate easier gameplay" OKAY THANKS

Whereas the current ArcSys and FB patch notes I mentioned have an entire spiel for the whole patch notes, per chapter (system, character) paragraphs explaining the logic behind the changes and intent, then a detailed technical explanation of each change.

It's a big read and a lot of work to produce I'm sure, and you still get some janky dev speak that isn't helped by Japanese to English. But man it's so much better than "duration of the move has been altered" and other such vague nonsense.

[Heh]

[Elkanah]

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We also should know which forum posts and where they were taken from. Cause so far, there hasnt been a surge of posts advising this need for change (other than a sarcasn one and one person complaining they basically suck at dps). So where did this gobshite of "player feedback" bs come from?

[Avoidy]

We also should know which forum posts and where they were taken from. Cause so far, there hasnt been a surge of posts advising this need for change (other than a sarcasn one and one person complaining they basically suck at dps). So where did this gobshite of "player feedback" bs come from?

This honestly. I've seen a lot of complaints about a number of things, but I haven't found a high-traction thread that complained about viper for being too busy. It would be nice to know what the devs are referring to when they talk about feedback. Are they getting it from a place that isn't the forums? Was it maybe a JP thread? Where did they get this impression?

Anyway, as someone who watched my old favorite job (ast) get even more gutted in shb, and then gutted again in endwalker, and then even further gutted in dawntrail, all I can say is enjoy viper while you still can. It's crazy to me that they are changing it after just a week, based on some "feedback" that doesn't even seem to exist, but here we are. I'm sorry your favorite class is probably about to get steamrolled into being as boring and crappy as every other job in this basic ass game. These devs love nothing more than to change a job based on feedback written by people who hate that job on a fundamental level and were never going to play it anyway.

[Absurdity]

It's crazy to me that they are changing it after just a week, based on some "feedback" that doesn't even seem to exist, but here we are. I'm sorry your favorite class is probably about to get steamrolled into being as boring and crappy as every other job in this basic ass game. These devs love nothing more than to change a job based on feedback written by people who hate that job on a fundamental level and were never going to play it anyway.

This is also entirely baffling to me. Over 50% of the people playing Viper right now are never going to touch the job again once the "new expansion job luster" has worn off.
So you're essentially taking job defining feedback from people who are only there as a tourist, probably just want the job to play like some other job they played before and have Viper collecting dust in a month.

[gllt]

That would encourage targeting other players for giving feedback when we already have a forum full of people who crawl into your thread to go NOOOO YOU CAN'T GIVE FEEDBACK IN THE FEEDBACK FORUM NOOO

Like I hate the relationship between devs and gamer feedback in modern games but I'm not sure it helps me to know who to sit and fume over. It doesn't make the patch magically better.

[Elkanah]

That would encourage targeting other players for giving feedback when we already have a forum full of people who crawl into your thread to go NOOOO YOU CAN'T GIVE FEEDBACK IN THE FEEDBACK FORUM NOOO

Like I hate the relationship between devs and gamer feedback in modern games but I'm not sure it helps me to know who to sit and fume over. It doesn't make the patch magically better.

We need to know how these became the action though. Ive sift through almost the entire forums based on viper ANYTHING. And not one of them has suggestions of problems with a billion likes attached to it. I think most of it is utter nonsense, and we need to know where it actually came from. We've had incredible numbers of healer pages and likes, but not once has any of the healer complaints had any fruit. Tanks over years, sams crying over kaiten, etc.

How many likes DOES it take to reach the top through YoshiP? Where did this come from? Only thing it suggests is JP casual players (cause that seems to be how devs does anything that makes 0 sense). I'll have to look through all of JP stuff over the next day or so, but I can almost guarantee they dont have that many likes either

[Kes13a]

We need to know how these became the action though. Ive sift through almost the entire forums based on viper ANYTHING. And not one of them has suggestions of problems with a billion likes attached to it. I think most of it is utter nonsense, and we need to know where it actually came from. We've had incredible numbers of healer pages and likes, but not once has any of the healer complaints had any fruit. Tanks over years, sams crying over kaiten, etc.

How many likes DOES it take to reach the top through YoshiP? Where did this come from? Only thing it suggests is JP casual players (cause that seems to be how devs does anything that makes 0 sense). I'll have to look through all of JP stuff over the next day or so, but I can almost guarantee they dont have that many likes either

I would say that none of the input come from the official forums in any language. forum users in general are only a small part of the gaming population

my guess is they either have play "testers" that they get reviews or feedback from, or, internal metrics. problem with internal metrics is depending on what they are asking, they may be getting numbers without proper context. truth is, they dont say anything so who knows. for all we know, they could be getting all this feedback from a seance with a dead dolphin named Hubert

[gllt]

Trust me I want to know more too but I assume they want to hide whatever publicly available metrics they look at to try and prevent manipulation. For example, if we KNOW likes matter, or likes matter on JP boards or matter more, we could manipulate that, and that's.. Not Good.

Like I don't want to harass anyone, I do want to better understand why the devs make the decisions they do and how it relates to what feedback, but I also don't want to jeopardize the potential integrity of the process. Not that I assume it's perfectly sound or anything..

It's all just so frustrating.