The forums are flawed as the main way to collect player feedback.

[LilaIronman]

The Forums are a bad way to collect player feedback
the devs are not reading at all, doing any feedback is such a joke for this game
Devs listen less here than Blizzard does for WoW lol

[Mecia]

Trying to give FL feedback here really is like screaming into the void. The disconnect is unbelievable.

[DelSolstice]

As for the mount tilt, that's pretty hilarious imo. I didn't even know about it. But it's a case by case sort of thing isn't it? Kaiten definitely isn't back. Mount tilt is something easily adjusted and of no real consequence to gameplay. It could also affect someone with motion sickness or something. When you combine all that I think it's easy to see why it happened.

The fact is, a lot of people found the mount tilt fun. Which is basically the point of gaming. Hell I'd been hoping they'd add it for years. Since it's causing a few player motion sickness, and not seizures or something like that, the solution should have just been to have it be an opt-in thing, not to nerf it into oblivion to the point where it's not even noticeable, especially when you can turn it off.



And now that we have the nerfed version too, they could easily add it back as an option with the nerfed version as well.


It'd be incredibly simple to do on their end too, I don't know what they were thinking with this extreme overreaction.

[Eraden]

Mao thinkings some peoples missing point. ALL kinds feedbacks has advantages and disadvantages. If has company whats highly dependent on making customers happys, however, is best to gather as much feedbacks as can and carefully sort through thems to glean trends. If nots do that then risk company downfall.

[glassflower]

Especially when such a small percentage even use the forums, yeah. Seeing the amount of views that a post on the English speaking forums gets vs. the Japanese (100k vs 3mil for one of my posts), and only an even smaller fraction of that posts... it's definitely skewed. I think it's good that this space exists, but I think the team should look on outreaching in a different way to the NA audience. They likely won't... but we've also seen a difference in their marketing push in DT, so maybe they will.

[CNitsah]

Forums are bad for feedback becasue:
Only a minority of the playerbase actually read/use/watch the forums
Also a lot of players dont want give feedback on forums - because they get atk'ed for their opinions.
And it dosn't help that the forum consists of mostly of the same "players" - it's a huge echo chamber.

It's overall a hostile and bad environment for feedback lol

you can say the same about all of the feedback collection method. Reddit is an echo chamber, active twitter users are mostly from a few demographic (public figures, activists, etc...) the average joe is pretty invisible. Most people just ignore survey, plus the way they write the question and possible answer limit the reach of feedback, etc. No feedback method is enough by itself, but that doesn't make it bad.

Especially when such a small percentage even use the forums, yeah. Seeing the amount of views that a post on the English speaking forums gets vs. the Japanese (100k vs 3mil for one of my posts), and only an even smaller fraction of that posts... it's definitely skewed.

There is a reason for that, japanese tend to do long ass megathread on one subject that last for YEARS (I mean look at this thread, 2.2m view, first message 10 years ago). As much as western forum tend to create 20 thread about the same things, and would benefit from posting in the thread existing about hte subject, japanese forum have the opposite problem. A thread last for years and talk about anything remotely related to one subject, making it a difficult to get a point if you were not there at the moment it was discussed. In western forum, thread rarely exceed a few week to a month of lifetime (the one that live longer are major subject. Over the past month, that was Wuk Lamat, downtrail writing, the graphic update thread and the healer strike). So of course they will have less view than the 3 year old thread about one subject. Japanese and english forum are two extremes, but honestly, none of them is ideal. At least here, the subject of threads are more focused.

[Turtledeluxe]

The fact is, a lot of people found the mount tilt fun. Which is basically the point of gaming. Hell I'd been hoping they'd add it for years. Since it's causing a few player motion sickness, and not seizures or something like that, the solution should have just been to have it be an opt-in thing, not to nerf it into oblivion to the point where it's not even noticeable, especially when you can turn it off.



And now that we have the nerfed version too, they could easily add it back as an option with the nerfed version as well.


It'd be incredibly simple to do on their end too, I don't know what they were thinking with this extreme overreaction.

That is correct. But this is an issue of the team and how they respond to feedback. I tend to call it unilateral. They do it with jobs as well. They always bring the hammer down on issues that are clearly divisive.

All I'm saying is, it doesn't prove the claim here that forums are fundamentally or especially a flawed way to collect feedback. They can be flawed in a statistical sense, but so can everything else.

The post just comes across a little too anti forums imo like "throw out forums because surveys are better!". If Yoshi P only relies on surveys that has its own potential pitfalls. It's as narrow-minded as what the team did here with mounts.

I'd actually say that the forums prove this post wrong. The healer thread is exponentially longer and has more detailed feedback than the mount thread. It has significantly more likes. Yet there's been no speedy overhaul of the healer role.

[Derio]

Forums are the worst way to collect player feedback. Its the reason that WAR is the way it is now and is the reason SMN is the way it is now.

[Talael]

Not only do the forums favor one specific region of players over the rest of the world, but it is also full of bad faith criticism. I imagine it's hard for them to find the good feedback here when many posts are completely ridiculous and say stuff like "Yoshi P hates us, (content) literally ruined my life, ded game" (this is barely an exaggeration).

Yoshi-P has a well known quote from a presentation where he states that "A complaint is worth twice a compliment. The silent always leave first. If they complain they still care". For the most part I agree with this sentiment but I think it has a big flaw in its logic. There are also people who are silent because they are happy with things and didn't feel the need to make a forum account to complain. I think their flawed method of collecting feedback shows in changes like the mount tilt system. A small minority of players didn't like it so they nerfed it to the displeasure to the majority of players who did like that feature. Now you have people complaining on the forums to revert the change but getting these devs to backpedal on a change is much harder.

What they should do is implement some form of player survey, either in-game or in emails to improve their data collection by seeking out the average player rather than having skewed data from the forums. If they had this feature they might've seen that like 85% of players liked the mount tilt as is and could've instead made it a toggle between off or the current intensity. But what instead happened was that they saw a few dozen people on the forums say they hated the tilt and extrapolated that it must be some widespread problem they need to address, and these are the ones who cared to "speak up" for the silent majority who were too apathetic to voice their complaints. They give a small reward for occasionally questions like a token for some minions or something idk. Make feedback represent the actual playerbase better!

For the first time since 1.0, the gamers reviews are trash. Just because you think the majority loves this horrible expansion, it doesnt make its true. Census shows theres just 600.000 players and all players review anywhere are negative. Foruns posts are super negative also, more so than normal. What can you possible have to show all this proof isnt right? Game is in a terrible state and YoshiP should be working to solve that.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

snip

I don’t think Reddit or X even count as a place they even seriously look at.

Also as for the healer homogenization threads that are ignored here, that goes back to the other issue I mentioned which is that we aren’t the JP forums. I do think they must have heard some of the homogenization complaints though if they are attempting to address that in 8.0. That issue would’ve been to big to ignore