Communication around job design and changes

[Valence]

One of the biggest problems right now (and since... forever?) is that the dev team is never talking about the actual changes or job additions they plan to do. They only and barely talk about them when everything is already ready and done, and do everything not to have to deal with feedback prior to it when it actually matters. The most recent occurrence of this happened with the VPR changes, where the dev team literally presented the players with a done deal, then tell us to give feedback but only when it's already too late. This, even though by the words of Yoshida himself, they're torn about everything with their decisions. Is the dev team so afraid of its own playerbase?

Moreover, when something happens to be very poorly received, which we have many examples for, since it is already too late anyway and because of SE's incredibly rigid and formulaic production schedules, we're generally stuck until the next expansion to see it changed again completely, and repeating the exact same mistake by not asking feedback about the new model. Some jobs like AST, MNK, get literally reworked every expansion like a shot in the dark because the devs do not talk with their players, they only present them with done deals and ask for feedback only after. On top of it, whenever they finally talk about something that caused a lot of friction in actual interviews, they mention feedback that we don't even know where it comes from (certainly not from there, where we're told to give our feedback). It's truly mind-boggling.

This is frankly not healthy for the game and I do feel it continues to strain the relationship with the community at large. If we actually had even summary presentations of what the dev battle team plans ahead of time to gauge the reaction of players, and got explanations of the thought process behind, perhaps more people could actually get on board with the process instead of feeling angry at what we're presented with.

[ovIm]

Forum user W00by has made a nice write up about the situation in the DPS forum. It's a good read that I will gladly link here.

Honestly, I feel incredibly defeated by it all. Whats even the point of making feedback when the devs just ignore even positive feedback and implement changes for the sake of... whatever? Really dampens any anticipatory excitement you may feel for new jobs or jobchanges, knowing SqEx can just decide that they don't want their customers having fun.

[OdinelStarrei]

Forum user W00by has made a nice write up about the situation in the DPS forum. It's a good read that I will gladly link here.

Honestly, I feel incredibly defeated by it all. Whats even the point of making feedback when the devs just ignore even positive feedback and implement changes for the sake of... whatever? Really dampens any anticipatory excitement you may feel for new jobs or jobchanges, knowing SqEx can just decide that they don't want their customers having fun.

This post is it, chief. The best part, is that you don't need to be a DPS main in order to understand the confusing situation we're in right now.

I've thought about it a lot over the last six years. Is it arrogance? Is it ignorance? Is it laziness? No, this guy nails it. It's a complete lack of confidence. That's why, even though they said they wouldn't, they cannot help but knee-jerk their decisions. They cannot help but cite "community feedback" but not actually cite where/what/who the community feedback came from. They are running around like rats in a maze with no exit.

Something that only a few of us are beginning to understand is the pure terminality of it all. For every brick they remove from the foundation, that's another brick that needs to not just be placed, but materials allocated, effort spent constructing, labor spent placing, and oversight needed to make sure the entire house of cards doesn't fall apart instantly.

Every time they rip something out of the game, that decreases the chance of ANYTHING that we like coming back in the game just from pure logistics. Because for every one step forward we make in job design, we take 3 LEAPS backwards. So not only do they have to work on stuff in the future, they have to work harder and faster just to get us BACK to the spot where we were at in 2019.

Machinist has been reworked THREE times. And it's most recent rework has had nothing substantial added to it for four years. Dark Knight, same thing. SMN? Reworked into oblivion, and STILL can't get anything interesting added to it. AST? Oh my God, there are more factions of AST players now than sides in most major war conflicts. And they literally destroyed Black Mage for no reason. Because the PvE job design lacks vision, it lacks passion, and it lacks intent, unless it's a brand new shiny thing meant to sell you the expansion. And even then, that's not exactly a sure fire thing, looking at what happened to Viper.

Remember that. Lack of confidence, and from there, a lack of accountability or justification for the mistakes made and the people left disappointed. And from there, a lack of both the incentive, and the willingness to do better. And we slide further into the grey muck.

It is way more interesting and realistic guessing how they are going to screw up jobs, than how they are going to improve on them. People were BEGGING them not to change Viper, because they KNEW what was going to happen. That's the loathsome state they put us in.

[Jeeqbit]

the dev team is never talking about the actual changes or job additions they plan to do.

If they are anything other than potency changes or anything major, they usually mention it in live letters or at fan fests and media tours.

They only and barely talk about them when everything is already ready and done, and do everything not to have to deal with feedback prior to it when it actually matters.

They actually clarified in one of the gamescom interviews that in the time between the lodestone post about the Viper changes, and the release of the Viper changes, they were prepared to make changes up until the last minute and were watching all the feedback to the post.

It was difficult to fully make it out since it was translated, but I think they intended to go further (such as to remove positionals and make it slower?) but they saw lot of players had already reached max level and were happy with it. I think even their own developers expressed concern about making it slower to play when the entire concept of it is about how fast it attacks.

repeating the exact same mistake by not asking feedback about the new model

While it's true they don't always ask for feedback, they don't necessarily need to... because people will definitely post it on the forums, where they ask it to be posted.

To give an example of where they listened to it, a lot of people said they wanted Astrologian's cards to have unique effects again. So now they do. They couldn't be the same as in Heavensward because a lot of the concepts we had then were removed (sharing MP, TP, etc).

Some jobs like AST, MNK, get literally reworked every expansion

MNK got reworked because tight "keep up" buffs and now permanent DoTs were removed from most jobs generally. With the job not having much sophistication to it at that point, I suppose they wanted to make all the different aspects work together like how SAM does.

they mention feedback that we don't even know where it comes from (certainly not from there, where we're told to give our feedback). It's truly mind-boggling.

It does seem strange. For example, they said they think more people wanted Kaiten removed than wanted it back, which seems astonishing. Maybe it is a vocal minority thing where it is somehow a minority that were in support of Kaiten, but I really didn't see anyone complain about Kaiten at all, ever.

If we actually had even summary presentations of what the dev battle team plans ahead of time to gauge the reaction of players, and got explanations of the thought process behind, perhaps more people could actually get on board with the process

I actually find most changes are in line with what raiders were predicting. For example, if they say "that job needs a buff", often that is what you see in an upcoming patch. When they said PLD was losing out due to having sustained damage instead of burst damage and losing its ranged advantage due to a larger hitbox, SE addressed that. It was just when they started throwing out "random" changes along with it like Kaiten that it started to cause friction.

[BabyYoda]

If you ask me the problem lie into 3 thing really:
Homonization
Lack of vision/confidence
Sticking with old concept and refuse to improve them

If these has been addressed people will be happy

[Connor]

Didn’t they say the reason the don’t talk about job balancing changes/adjustments before they’re out anymore is because they kept getting criticised for them and were like ‘but you haven’t played it yet!!!’ (lol)

Ironically they’re causing major criticism of their job design, because of their complete fear of…criticism? lol. If they actually talked to players beforehand and tried to accomodate that feedback, they’d get a hell of a lot less complaints I’d say

[Jeeqbit]

If they actually talked to players beforehand and tried to accomodate that feedback, they’d get a hell of a lot less complaints I’d say

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

1. Post regularly on the forums, and get inundated with polarized views and well-thought out replies being drowned out by ones that are not. Almost leaving them back at square one.
2. Do a conference system where only one person is allowed to speak at a time, like a TED talk or discord's stage calls. I suppose this could be like the Q&As they have done before, but allow them more time to put their point across.
3. Do a livestream and read the chat like they've done occasionally in live letters.
4. Ask people to post on the forums anyway but not reply because it'd get drowned out by all the polarized discussion, then aggregate the feedback.
5. Meet people in person instead which forces people to choose their words and thoughts more carefully, like they have been doing recently with fanfests, gamescom, pax, etc.

It's easy to just say "talk to us". But if you think about it they kinda have done many of the options. It's perhaps just doing it more ie. interacting with twitch/youtube chat more during liveletters to have thorough discussions/debates, aggregating feedback better from the forums, regular reddit AMAs.

But even if they did all of this more, would it change much? If all they get from that is polarized views, they will be in the same situation: unsure which direction to go because people are split and there are different parts of the community to cater to.

[ovIm]

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

I mean, this here was a good way to talk to us.

For the first time in FFXIV, upcoming job adjustments were talked about in a blog post. And players had a chance to give feedback to what was planned. This was a good thing, overall, and interestingly enough, most feedback I have read on the forum was more constructive.

The method is good - announce something like that, have the forums discuss it, and have community managers aggregate player feedback to forward to the dev team.

In terms of Viper, there was no criticism about the job design as it was, it was mostly praise that Square Enix build the job well, and to not change it. Yoshi-P even acknowledges this. Its frustrating when the devs open a dialogue like that, only to ignore our feedback.

Alternatively, SqEx could also just... make ingame polls, and ask for players opinions there.

[Supersnow845]

So imagine they "talked" to us. How should they go about this?

1. Post regularly on the forums, and get inundated with polarized views and well-thought out replies being drowned out by ones that are not. Almost leaving them back at square one.
2. Do a conference system where only one person is allowed to speak at a time, like a TED talk or discord's stage calls. I suppose this could be like the Q&As they have done before, but allow them more time to put their point across.
3. Do a livestream and read the chat like they've done occasionally in live letters.
4. Ask people to post on the forums anyway but not reply because it'd get drowned out by all the polarized discussion, then aggregate the feedback.
5. Meet people in person instead which forces people to choose their words and thoughts more carefully, like they have been doing recently with fanfests, gamescom, pax, etc.

It's easy to just say "talk to us". But if you think about it they kinda have done many of the options. It's perhaps just doing it more ie. interacting with twitch/youtube chat more during liveletters to have thorough discussions/debates, aggregating feedback better from the forums, regular reddit AMAs.

But even if they did all of this more, would it change much? If all they get from that is polarized views, they will be in the same situation: unsure which direction to go because people are split and there are different parts of the community to cater to.

Almost every other MMO has some kind of proper feedback loop that isn’t built on randomly flailing about in the dark on the forums and hoping that something comes out of it

For example a semi regular thing that gets used is community polls

Let’s take VPR changes

Option 1) remove noxious
Option 2) remove or reduce positionals
Option 3) slow the job down
Option 4) do nothing

People vote on that then that gives the devs a good lead into it, don’t let us pick what you are going to do, pick a narrow set of possible fixes to a problem you have identified and allow us to vote on our preferred action. You could even weight polls by a pre-selected “main” that each person picks

Direct communication on the current forum system won’t go very far but that’s specifically because they’ve allowed the forums to collapse into a cesspit where everyone is just screaming hoping to be the one random person they apparently pull the feedback from when they make a change

[Valence]

If they are anything other than potency changes or anything major, they usually mention it in live letters or at fan fests and media tours.

Not in live letters no. They generally mention they're working on a job rework in LLs, at most.

The only LLs that actually showcase reworks in details are media tour LLs just before the release of an expansion, for the 2 new jobs only.

The only reveal we get for other jobs happen a month after with the media tour itself and footage and screens coming out of it showing the actual grit and details of what we're getting. Changing anything at this point especially by their production process, is a fool's errand, it's already been too late for half a year at this point.

They actually clarified in one of the gamescom interviews that in the time between the lodestone post about the Viper changes, and the release of the Viper changes, they were prepared to make changes up until the last minute and were watching all the feedback to the post.

This is what was announced specifically about VPR:

Planned Viper Adjustments
Newly released in Patch 7.0, 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 in Patch 7.05, though we also intend to make some smaller adjustments to the range of certain abilities in Patch 7.01. It will take a while longer, but we hope to address player concerns as best we can.

What is there even to give feedback about this? It's vague as hell. Only the positional mention is somewhat telling, and people rioted about it, and they didn't proceed with it. But changing the effects of actions? How the heck are we even supposed to give feedback on something like this? It's like they stay so vague on purpose not to start a nuclear war.

It was difficult to fully make it out since it was translated, but I think they intended to go further (such as to remove positionals and make it slower?) but they saw lot of players had already reached max level and were happy with it. I think even their own developers expressed concern about making it slower to play when the entire concept of it is about how fast it attacks.

It's completely schizophrenic. They're not sure about changing something drastically, but they finally decide to go with it even though they know it's gonna cause an uproar and a total loss of trust in the player's side.

They pulled the exact same crap with AST, if you remember, when in the pre release LL they presented AST quickly and clearly spelled out "we know it's a very divisive topic in the community but we have decided to remove all rng from the card system". If it is so divisive, why are you arbitrarily changing it? Why are you giving the middle finger of all the players that have been enjoying it since the beginning? Why are you removing the single thing left from AST's original concept? If something is gonna be split either way, deciding to change it for the opposite of what it is to please the other side is absolutely wild.

Still no explanation for it.

To give an example of where they listened to it, a lot of people said they wanted Astrologian's cards to have unique effects again. So now they do. They couldn't be the same as in Heavensward because a lot of the concepts we had then were removed (sharing MP, TP, etc).

This is exactly what I've been aiming at in the OP: they do listen to some feedback AFTER the fact. Especially when a job design eventually shows that it's pretty mid and is going literally nowhere remotely flavorful or interesting (aka ShB/EW card system). So you complain about it at expansion release, and then during 2-3 whole years, until they change it next expansion because they do not change jobs within an expansion unless to prep for a later rework like MNK in ShB (which felt like a first for them anyway, and made the job so awful and boring for half of ShB that it was probably not the way to do it either).

So in the case of AST, yes, it's the whole point: you get a change trying to account for SOME feedback in the next expansion... if you're lucky and if the job is not successful, and/or if the devs realize they've reached a dead end on the design. But as for giving actual feedback WHILE the job is being reworked during the expansion? You can't. They will only showcase it once the rework is mostly done before release during media tours, running the risk of repeating the exact same mistake, because if things suck with it, we're all stuck until the expansion after anyway, and we will only be able to give feedback on the current sucky version of the job and not what they're actually cooking. It's a crazy cycle when you think about it.

I actually find most changes are in line with what raiders were predicting. For example, if they say "that job needs a buff", often that is what you see in an upcoming patch.

Are you serious? You've seen the state of range physical since 2019?