JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[Wayfinder3]

OP clickbait title is hilarious cause it points out who didn't even read the first line. LMFAO, internet people are ridiculous

[Tsumdere]

It's a pretty small sample size and spiked in activity coinciding with the WoW exodus so it's entirely possible there's an unnaturally large overlap in Steam XIV players and WoW players. Prior to that most XIV players typically warned people away from buying on Steam with how your account gets locked in to Steam-only forever.

And you have no proof that Yoshi-P won't kiss me.

In what world is (very conservative estimate) 40,000 people a small sample size? (the all time peak is actually 100,000 which means there is at least 100,000k people who own the non-trial version on Steam... but we'll go lower). Lucky Bancho shows that there is around 1.5 million-ish people at endgame and 40k random people is way, way, way more than you need to sample for one million people.

Also, WoW isn't on Steam so there wouldn't be any reason to think that WoW players would have a predisposition to buy the Steam version. Not that me or you could ever know, but they could also just as easily be on the client version.

I do have proof. My uncle works at Square Enix and he tells me everything about Yoshi-P. >

the better source is to look at luckybancho's surveys to see increase/decrease in population from month to month.

Lucky Bancho is also not all encompassing. It doesn't count players who haven't earned any achievements for that patch cycle nor does it count those under level 60, meaning that, for example, the hoards of Limsa Lurkers who only use the game to RP at level 1 don't show up. Neither do people who private their Lodestone.
Steam and Lucky Bancho sample the same player base and both do not sample the entire playerbase, so there is no reason to dismiss one and not the other. Besides, Steam and Lucky Bancho have never contradicted each other. Steam goes up big - so does Lucky Bancho. Steam go down big - so does Lucky Bancho.

[Fawkes]

Also, WoW isn't on Steam so there wouldn't be any reason to think that WoW players would have a predisposition to buy the Steam version. Not that me or you could ever know, but they could also just as easily be on the client version.

Even if not WoW players, it's disproportionately new players. Outside of Stormblood's release date the steamcharts is basically a flat line slowly climbing from 5k to 10k up until Shadowbringers in 2019. And the lucky bancho numbers haven't gone up tenfold since Shadowbringers. The peaks and valleys of the steam version are significantly exaggerated by comparison, and since lucky bancho doesn't have all the data either the real numbers are likely even less so. You can't look at the steam numbers and say "We're at pre-wow exodus numbers!" when the steamcharts basically only show post-shadowbringers players. That's not even to say it's not worse, there could be a lot of long-term players leaving, but you can't see that data looking at steam.

I do have proof. My uncle works at Square Enix and he tells me everything about Yoshi-P. >:(

;_;

[Catwho]

I think they made the same mistake that they made with XII. The average player of XIV isn't a teenager or a young adult. Making the "main" character of the story a young naive dummy who learns about her place in the world just has the rest of the cast, including our WoLs (some of whom are imagined to be in their 30s and 40s) to want to collectively turn around and go "SHUT UP VAN" every 10 minutes.

I didn't hate Wuk Lamat. But I completely understand why a lot of people resented her.

[Rolder50]

Is the YoshiP Primal Tempering finally wearing off? Never thought I’d see the day.

[SDaemon]

Is the YoshiP Primal Tempering finally wearing off? Never thought I’d see the day.

Players have been critical of Yoshi P since ARR. Every time there is something the community views negatively they come together and criticize him. Time passes, they either forget their woes or get drowned out amongst other, newer issues that come up and time keeps moving forward. Genuinely don't see this being any different.

[All_Nonsense]

It's hard to quantify a success metric for a live service game. Players usually determine it based on their opinion of the current state of the game, and the developers base it on more empirical figures such as active subscription count and revenue stream. Obviously this is a pretty big simplification of how the parties involved think, but it does outline the natural disparity that occurs organically in a developer-player relationship. So what we then tend to look at is how the developer bridges that gap (as we should rightfully expect them to do).

Yoshi P and the lead members of the development team did a wonderful job of this over the course of about a decade. It was a delight. I have noticed a strange behavior from the dev team since about this time last year that's been concerning however, and it's that they don't seem as engaged with us as they used to. It's like they've pulled back from the player base for some reason. Everyone isn't going to stick their proverbial finger in the air to determine the wind direction here, but subconsciously I feel like folks became attuned to this mild division at some point and this in turn has magnified their reactions to YoshiP's completely tone-deaf and out of touch response as a result. It has scared people who don't want to lose one of the last vestiges of a game dev having a good relationship with its playerbase. A lot of us were there for WoW and Destiny 2's transformation into "the villain," (it's complicated and I don't feel like picking different words ) and they're scared that it's going to happen here now. That's why everyone is blowing up rn.

I do think that YoshiP stepping down would be the worst possible thing for this game tho. The folks who think that's a good thing have no idea how much of a death knell that would truly be, or how fortunate we are to have YoshiP at the helm of this game.

[BakoolJaJa]

A lot of us were there for WoW and Destiny 2's transformation into "the villain," (it's complicated and I don't feel like picking different words ) and they're scared that it's going to happen here now. That's why everyone is blowing up rn.

I do think that YoshiP stepping down would be the worst possible thing for this game tho. The folks who think that's a good thing have no idea how much of a death knell that would truly be, or how fortunate we are to have YoshiP at the helm of this game.

Humans are good at seeing patterns. Many other MMOs and live service games have gone through similar. It always starts out very mild. There is always a lot of defensiveness at first and hope that the things happening are just an outlier. That it's going to get better. The next expansion? They'll totally take the feedback to heart and fix things. Except somewhere in the back of our minds we realize that... this current situation isn't actually an outlier. That jobs have been getting dumbed down more and more since multiple expansions. That the story has been getting worse since the previous expansion. That many of the issues that were promised to get fixed (like the limited races) are in fact not getting fixed. That the encounter design fixes keep on getting delayed. That all the content and gameplay are incredibly stale, remaining unchanged since literally ARR. Etc. Dawntrail isn't SUDDENLY different and bad. It is just a progressive decline.

Like boiling a frog and all that.

And Yoshi P has absolutely nothing to do with anything. People keep on using him as a scapegoat or as some god who can do no wrong. Very convenient for Square Enix. The ones that are gladly leeching money off of ffxiv and giving nothing in return. The ones that are to blame for the team not having enough resources. The ones that will be to blame, should the game eventually go to shit similarly to Destiny and many others. But instead of paying attention to what they are doing, we are fixated on reading pointless Yoshi P interviews filled with PR talk, and acting like he is the singular entity working on the game. SE love him for that though.

Once he steps down... I genuinely think that will be it. Not because he is so great or because he is so terrible. Just because at that point Square Enix will be done with this game. Other than with using it as a cheap cash grab of course, but I will not be sticking around to play that.

[AnimaAnimus]

Yoshi P and the lead members of the development team did a wonderful job of this over the course of about a decade. It was a delight. I have noticed a strange behavior from the dev team since about this time last year that's been concerning however, and it's that they don't seem as engaged with us as they used to. It's like they've pulled back from the player base for some reason. .

I personally think they are just scared of not only the more common social backlashes and criticisms that are happening more and more as time passes, but also fear of trying something different and losing the casual and rp playerbase that they so heavily rely on. And that fear is causing them to spin out in a rut. Not only in a game perpective with the unwillingness to try things that are drastically different or design jobs in a way that it creates any sort of need for players to actually be fully engaged, but also with story perspective.

They don't want to do anything drastic. They will not have any conflict amongst the scions, they do not want us to face anything that will cause us to lose anymore so as not to upset the players that want everything rainbows and lollipops. And those kids are very loud and the tantrums are real. So much so that it is incredibly difficult to even make well thought out arguments because no matter how well you do, you get beat down, downvoted, and harrassed on social media. Which is why the forums come off as so negative, because its literally the only space we have to talk openly about what we don't like. So they just close themselves off and do what they think we want. And that not only severly limits what they can do but it also severely limits how they do it. Everything being solved with friendship, an already all too common trope in Japanese story telling, is so incredibly boring.

Let's face it. Endwalker should have been about war, it should have been dirty and gritty and put us through the paces. Zodiarc should never have been such a pushover, the Garleans should never have fallen off camera. The scions should have suffered loses. There should have been scenes that made us feel sad, angry or made us yell at our screens. When a story elicits emotions like that you know, as a writer, that you did well. But none of that stuff is safe. It will anger the fans who are scared of feeling anything negative. So now we are feeling angry, we are feeling sad and we are yelling at our screens, but in the wrong way.

This game was never suppsed to be this way. The original plan for HW was to make it really dark and gritty, which you can see in the trailer. But, according the Yoshida, the then CEO didn't like the idea and wanted to make it more light and happy to attract a wider audience. Which eventually led us to where we are today. Now we have that wider audience and they are made up of a bunch of emotionally immature kids who are holding the devs and metaphorical gunpoint, which is more damaging to the game then just letting creatives be creative.

[Talamh]

... letting creatives be creative.

This, I agree so much with this.

I refer to the poisoning of the Sultana as FFXIV trying to do "The Red Wedding" in a very negative connotation.
I sincerely could not take a single moment in that cutscene serious because by that point, we were literary already a Godslayer yet here was this twerp acting like he was a genuine threat.
And now... There's no more tension in the story. We are, a God, by all intents and purpose.

If you ask me the best ending for Endwalker is one where we died in the final battle and faded into legend.
But that'd mean an end to the adventure. Great for a book, or movie. Bad for a game aiming to keep players playing.

The cost of that however is, the removal of all tension.

There was a moment in Gunblade storyarc where, just for a split second, my mind went "What if this is the end?". I liked that thought.

So I agree with you fully.