Opinion: The Development Team should revert to Q&A for Livestreams

[HyperiusUltima]

And no, I'm not saying just cherry-picking questions that are convenient to answer.

Look at what questions garner the most attention and try to answer those in a concise way so the playerbase understands.

The reason why you've lost the playerbase's trust Yoshida and Dev Team is because you've ignored us for too long. Back in Stormblood, during that particular Media Tour, White Mage got an immense amount of backlash for having a job gauge that didn't make sense - Lilies for it were horrible in the way that Benison cost ALL of your gauge while another ability cost 2, for no added benefit. The players saw this and provided feedback, and the response we got on that?

You weren't going to show it in Preliminary anymore after that Media Tour because it was providing stress on the dev team due to criticism. While I understand that, I've had time to be able to watch other developers on other games handle this kind of issue when it comes to their live service - either they shadow patch like you are doing right now when it comes to jobs on patch drop(meaning you aren't giving us the preliminary so we won't be able to even begin discussion in the Forum) or they work hard to appease them.

When it comes to an MMO of this scale, it becomes problematic due to the massive amount of people that want to chime in on things like this. Negative opinions are only really typically abound in the Forums because that's where your feedback is located - bad or not. It shows people are dissatisfied with the service, and want it to be better.

If you bring out a Q&A at every livestream, the community will provide plenty of questions for you to answer in a Q&A section. Will the livestream be a bit longer? Possibly. Will it be constructive and help the community? It will if you will be direct with them instead of avoiding certain questions. Healers were largely ignored in this respect when it came to Q&A while DPS and Tanks got theirs answered, along with miscellanious questions.

Now, there's one elephant in the room I do want to address since it has been an issue since Stormblood: The Dev Team's rescinding of information in Preliminary Notes.




The rescinding of information, in case people skimmed, is because of overwhelming negative feedback regarding White Mage in Stormblood. This was so that player opinions wouldn't heavily affect the dev team's motivation to work on jobs and make them in different ways. This lead to Shadowbringers, where they reset everything and made Healers the way they are today to rebuild from the ground up. This didn't happen in Endwalker or Dawntrail.

Every major patch, we'd be lead on by the belief that "things will get better" and to "please look forward to it". You can't keep saying that line Yoshida, because if anything that promise of looking forward to it is broken because of how Dawntrail has been received, and how the content has been received.

If we continue to get ignored, the next expansion is going to be a trash fire, followed by further patches after 7.3. Final Fantasy's brand is entirely reliant upon its story - XIV has both made a huge success by that, but has also tarnished it with this expansion. Going forward, they need to be willing to listen to everyone - and hear out their concerns. Otherwise, I don't see XIV lasting for another expansion before the playerbase drops to what it was back in ARR if we aren't already on that track with how things are going.

[Raikai]

"please look forward to it"

I hate that phrase so much. You can't look forward to something you don't have the slightest reference about. Do they think that people really hype the unknown?

"A new restaurant is coming to town, look forward to it!" is certainly less effective than "A taiwanese restaurant is coming to town, look forward to it!"

[Jeeqbit]

Usually they give a small spoiler about things before saying "look forward to it". I mean, you can't spoil the entire thing without, well, spoiling it. And then the point is defeated. Quite frankly, the amount of information they give is enough to figure out a whole story mostly. I was able to figure out, vaguely, the whole flow of events in Dawntrail for example just purely based on vague details they gave: area names, dungeon crawl, boss names, map. For example, it was obvious it would be Kozama'uka (Dungeon1) > Urqopacha (Dungeon2/Valigarmanda) > Yak T'el (dungeon3) > Shaaloani (dungeon4) > Heritage Found (dungeon5) > Zoraal Ja > Mystery Area (Dungeon6/mystery villain)

And we were not just told Zoraal Ja was a major villain in the keynotes but also in 6.55. In both we were told about Valigarmanda as well who I instantly knew was the 93 trial. Due to the map we could instantly pinpoint all the locations and match them to their respective dungeons and guess Zoraal Ja fit in there. Seeing Yoshi-P fly around Yak T'el confirmed for sure its level range had enemies of 94 proving it was indeed before Shaaloani as it looked.

Quite frankly, my prediction at the time was it would be a boring story about someone slowly becoming a politician while you take out their opponents, but that SE likes a big larger-than-life fantasy to happen by the end of it, so the end would have to involve something mystical like visiting a shard, time travel, etc. So I knew what to expect really. Watching live letters spoils me enough as it is.

So it's fine to use this phrase for certain things like story. I don't know if they even use it for job changes. Why would they when they hold off on the details?

[HyperiusUltima]

So it's fine to use this phrase for certain things like story. I don't know if they even use it for job changes. Why would they when they hold off on the details?

Because they don't want their dev team to become demoralized. When you've made something or made changes to something existing that a player plays as and the moment they get information from a Media Tour or other information source they start making speculations. Feedback mid-expansion is usually pointed towards next expansion to where they will make meaningful changes so they don't drastically have to upend their content pipeline for Raid Content.

If anything, they need to at the least deal with the backlash they've gotten since Endwalker about homogenization and every job being the same with different bells and whistles. It doesn't take 4 years to respond to feedback - but it takes apparently 8 years for some because they don't listen until it gets shouted out by an influencer or such.

Influencers sometimes have a negative effect on the game as they make narratives. Sometimes, these narratives are not very well fleshed out. There are sometimes even controversies over certain things(i.e. Warrior Soloing through the 91 dungeon of Dawntrail without repercussions in Media Tour) that are still ongoing to this day that people have complained about back in Endwalker(Tanks) or Shadowbringers(Healers). I suppose it's DPS turn now.

[Vesplume]

It's been said that FFXIV's media was set up is the way it currently is with the intent of being a dialogue between the devs and the playerbase. 1.0 didn't even have player forums, and they considered that a problem when trying to fix the game back then. With the way DT has gone, the illusion of the devs having a dialogue with the players has been broken. Comments have been made about certain issues that have come up - like the part of this past live letter addressing concerns about CE and OC. Where is the feedback coming from? What determines which issues the devs are going to address at all? People can get toxic about their pet issues and that sucks for the devs. Negative feedback is disheartening.

After all this time the players are also disheartened, and without their subs there is no game. But what can be done about it? Most of us are here because this is the official place to give feedback on the game. Where else do we go? The exit survey gives a handful of vague and unhelpful replies and that's it.

I agree there should be Q&A or some way to give productive feedback. Square Enix can eat the cost of paying people to moderate those questions to lessen the negative impact on devs if need be.

[ty_taurus]

Because they don't want their dev team to become demoralized. When you've made something or made changes to something existing that a player plays as and the moment they get information from a Media Tour or other information source they start making speculations. Feedback mid-expansion is usually pointed towards next expansion to where they will make meaningful changes so they don't drastically have to upend their content pipeline for Raid Content.

If anything, they need to at the least deal with the backlash they've gotten since Endwalker about homogenization and every job being the same with different bells and whistles. It doesn't take 4 years to respond to feedback - but it takes apparently 8 years for some because they don't listen until it gets shouted out by an influencer or such.

Influencers sometimes have a negative effect on the game as they make narratives. Sometimes, these narratives are not very well fleshed out. There are sometimes even controversies over certain things(i.e. Warrior Soloing through the 91 dungeon of Dawntrail without repercussions in Media Tour) that are still ongoing to this day that people have complained about back in Endwalker(Tanks) or Shadowbringers(Healers). I suppose it's DPS turn now.

You know what, I didn't praise the XIV devs enough here on the forums back when healer design was fantastic. I should've been here shouting about how masterful the design was, but I didn't because I took it for granted. FFXIV designers, you don't know how innovative and well-designed your healer role was during the first half of XIV's lifespan. Were there imperfections? Sure. But for what it's worth, Scholar was a near masterpiece. You guys did that. But you also changed that, and that change absolutely ruined the beauty you had previously created.

If showering you with praise and positive feedback is what it will take, then I will absolutely do that if healers change for the better. I will be back here with positivity, praise, and encouragement, and I will fight any naysayer who disagrees. But I can't do that until I see change. This path of absolute simplification has been one of your biggest mistakes, and I cannot praise that. You have taken your masterpiece and set it on fire with your own hands. But if you can finally acknowledge the years of criticism of job design and strive to correct it, you can paint a new masterpiece. Maybe it won't be perfect---it probably wont be, but I will absolutely make sure to praise every strength if that's what it will take to convince you to change. You will not have nothing but overwhelming negativity on here if you are willing to make the necessary changes.

[Jeeqbit]

It's been said that FFXIV's media was set up is the way it currently is with the intent of being a dialogue between the devs and the playerbase.

Live letters were, yes. The idea of them was that it was revolutionary for the industry to do it. Which I'm not so sure about. Every other MMORPG has done streams since the early 2010s as well, and before we had the universally good data transfer speeds we have now, many of them at least had forums. Whether they actually listened to them will certainly have varied, but bug reports are important for developers so they needed to be able to see feedback.

Most likely thinking of streams was a natural idea given twitch becoming a thing and good data transfer speeds being more widespread.

1.0 didn't even have player forums

You can access the 1.0 forums right now, so they did have them. In fact, it was the few people on the forums white knighting for them that motivated them to remake the game in the first place. If there wasn't a few people that still believed in the game somewhere in the fog, it would have been harder to continue.

They even had them for FF11. The reason this forum software is from the early 2000s is because they just copied FF11's forum infrastructure.

I agree there should be Q&A or some way to give productive feedback. Square Enix can eat the cost of paying people to moderate those questions to lessen the negative impact on devs if need be.

Arguably that's exactly what they did with the Q&A in the last live letter. The feedback was obviously sifted through and presented as politely-worded questions. It would be nice if those Q&As happened more.

But really, I do think they are listening but what they are doing is reflecting the improvements in new content. For example, people would say how the battles had got boring so their focus has been to make new ones more exciting and they have felt more exciting.

A lot of the complaints, if you think about it, are more about old things. Old open world. Abandoned systems that haven't been improved to reflect 2025. All sorts of quality of life issues like housing, annoying settings. The battle processing, or available actions at lower levels, or how interesting all the old roulette content is and how squishy old hunts are. Even Dawntrail's base MSQ is now "old and abandoned" so they won't act on feedback for it.

It comes down to that no matter how much they improve new things, the old things are mostly abandoned and seen as yesterday's news, and that's slowly been building resentment.

[HyperiusUltima]

But really, I do think they are listening but what they are doing is reflecting the improvements in new content. For example, people would say how the battles had got boring so their focus has been to make new ones more exciting and they have felt more exciting.

Only now because we've complained about nearly every aspect of Dawntrail content except the Raid Tier. I wonder if it's because they had an actual good story and raid content in there aside from the first tier?

A lot of the complaints, if you think about it, are more about old things.

Yes and no. Old things such as the overworld sure - I can grasp that considering the main complaint about that has been that the overworld is mostly "empty" because we don't have people running around except those in the MSQ. They've tried to mitigate that by adding the Shared FATE system, which leaves a lot to do if you plan on getting anything with vouchers. What they're complaining about the most right now is how every piece of new content isn't good.

- Chaotic was a complete and utter failure on release due to how strict mechanics were for 24 people to complete - and I highly doubt they'll give another Chaotic again after the backlash.

- Cosmic Exploration got an immense amount of flak due to Gatherers not recovering GP after completion, the content essentially becoming FOMO in terms of progress because of how the FATEs are scheduled, and what's worse than taking a battery out of a robot and putting in a new one when we got completely new systems called RED ALERTS utilizing the Crafting and Gathering System as it should? Not to mention, people abandoning it after they've achieved their goal(which can be whatever that is, probably crafting relic).

- Now, Occult Crescent is under fire not only for not having a normal mode Forked Tower like Bozja did, but also for making us do instance prog. They addressed those issues in the live stream...which won't happen until 7.3. Thanks Yoshida.

People are less annoyed by how old systems are than they are about the content that's coming out of the pipeline. Post-patch Endwalker was a disaster outside of the raids story-wise. Dawntrail? Moreso. As for the questions on live stream, it wouldn't surprise me that Yoshida himself made some questions based on the feedback they got out of Occult Crescent and Cosmic Exploration that were glaring that he had to address them before it mounted up to content being dead on arrival like Chaotic nearly was. As I've said already, we really need a Q&A section with questions given by players themselves that are constructive and point out specific issues without them cherry-picking.

[NanaWiloh]

I would like to see them answer more questions but only for questions they are ready to answer and have the answers too.

[Valence]

They keep regularly complaining about the lack of politeness on the forums and social media as if it explained everything. In fact they have done so multiple time by now, and while I certainly won't fault the comment (toxicity breeds nothing), this insistence on formality when you've been running a multi dollar company/studio sounds extremely weird to me. Are they trying to dismiss the feedback and comments just because some are written by toxic users? Are they just going to systematically deflect over the form rather than the content?

It's your job to sift through this. If you can't handle it, hire someone that can. Hire moderators as well. But this fixation on people being rude above everything else is just weird.