Final Fantasy XIV

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Okay, it's a cesspool of sensitive leftist snowfuckingflakes who treat you like absolute **** because they maxed everything to level 100 and never touched a ******* woman in their lives. It's a collection of ******* sadists who have to find entertainment in telling people to off themselves because they can't admit themselves they are insecure fucks.

Is that better?

That's fairly accurate to what I found in the game. I quit after a spat with a guildie who was a doctor (chiropractor lol) that acted superior and kicked me out of our raid for being horribly sick with flu. Best part was the raid was supposedly semi-casual and we were supposed to agree on a time to raid, not just go when he said but of course that never happened. Realised not long after that I wadna having fun and turned it off.

Well it's very nice to find a group of people who share my frustration. I'm glad I'm not the only one who experienced this cancerous environment that sucks the life out of you physically and mentally.

I have played a lot of MMOs. ACE Online, EVE Online, Star Trek Online, SWTOR, LotRO, Warhammer, Guild Wars 1, GW2, Champions Online... so many I cannot recall all of them off of the top of my head. I overall had pleasant experiences in almost all of them except for one. WoW is the only MMO where I have had a substantial amount of negative experiences from other people, namely there being a lot of tryhards who demand that everyone else be this super perfect person who has memorized all of the strats on day 1 of a new raid's release and shout at other people to give mythic raider performance in a normal PUG. Or the people in RBG groups who would rather **** on someone for not knowing an esoteric technically difficult to execute counterplay as a prot paladin sitting a flag against a rogue than teach him how to stall for as long as possible. No other MMO is comparable to that experience as far as I can recall. I would have to look outside of MMOs at other games like shooters or MOBAs to see a comparable level of anger and personal attacks.

[rusty_shackleford]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

ff14 1.jpg

ff14 0.png

[CornCake]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

All of these ads are from males

[Val the Moofia Boss]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

I would assume you were not on the Aether datacenter then. They added cross data center travel (ie server transfers but you don't need to exit the game or pay money to do it, you can just hop DCs in about 60 to 90 seconds). Before DC travel, the Aether data center was the one in the US that was known as the raider DC. So when DC travel happened, it created a culture where people would first DC travel to Aether to then join or create raid pugs there, and then at the end of their play session travel back to their home DCs to hang out with their friends or access their house or auctions. So yeah the non-Aether DCs have lots of venue advertisements. You can use this website to see all of the current party finder listings in the game and sort them by datacenter.

[rusty_shackleford]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

I would assume you were not on the Aether datacenter then. They added cross data center travel (ie server transfers but you don't need to exit the game or pay money to do it, you can just hop DCs in about 60 to 90 seconds). Before DC travel, the Aether data center was the one in the US that was known as the raider DC. So when DC travel happened, it created a culture where people would first DC travel to Aether to then join or create raid pugs there, and then at the end of their play session travel back to their home DCs to hang out with their friends or access their house or auctions. So yeah the non-Aether DCs have lots of venue advertisements. You can use this website to see all of the current party finder listings in the game and sort them by datacenter.

There was only like 1 server I could create a character on because square enix is a small indie company that can't afford servers

[GhostShiroyama]

Well I was feeling like **** from the other night playing with these ******* losers and thought it was only me dealing with this. I thought I was crazy to think I was sane and that maybe I was the problem but you guys made me feel much better so I highly appreciate it, bringing me back to reality

[Val the Moofia Boss]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

I would assume you were not on the Aether datacenter then. They added cross data center travel (ie server transfers but you don't need to exit the game or pay money to do it, you can just hop DCs in about 60 to 90 seconds). Before DC travel, the Aether data center was the one in the US that was known as the raider DC. So when DC travel happened, it created a culture where people would first DC travel to Aether to then join or create raid pugs there, and then at the end of their play session travel back to their home DCs to hang out with their friends or access their house or auctions. So yeah the non-Aether DCs have lots of venue advertisements. You can use this website to see all of the current party finder listings in the game and sort them by datacenter.

There was only like 1 server I could create a character on because square enix is a small indie company that can't afford servers

Yeah. FF14's backend server stuff is infamous. There is an input delay that makes it so that most Western players have to use a mod called XIValexander to reduce the input delay while WoW has instantly responsive controls. For some reason we can only hold 800 transmog items in our glamour wardrobes while WoW just has a true/false toggle for whether or not you ever acquired and soulbound any item in the game and can thus transmog it from your transmog window. Lots of irksome things like that and Square can't seem to be bothered to spend their monthly sub millions to fix it. Earlier this year they botched the implementation of a player blacklist function, where each account still had a unique ID that the modders could sleuth and were able to record a large percentage of the current active playerbase's IDs and collate them into a spreadsheet that let people tell who was an alt of who. Could you imagine if this happened in any other software industry?

[CornCake]

the group search for my server was only people trying to ERP or sell runs

I would assume you were not on the Aether datacenter then. They added cross data center travel (ie server transfers but you don't need to exit the game or pay money to do it, you can just hop DCs in about 60 to 90 seconds). Before DC travel, the Aether data center was the one in the US that was known as the raider DC. So when DC travel happened, it created a culture where people would first DC travel to Aether to then join or create raid pugs there, and then at the end of their play session travel back to their home DCs to hang out with their friends or access their house or auctions. So yeah the non-Aether DCs have lots of venue advertisements. You can use this website to see all of the current party finder listings in the game and sort them by datacenter.

There was only like 1 server I could create a character on because square enix is a small indie company that can't afford servers

That shite was ******* glaikit, having to buy a ******* transfer to play on the same server as me mates as you could make one only on unlocked servers, but could transfer to locked ones. Lost 12 pounds to that ******* ******** and they made me wait 3 days to do it.

[rusty_shackleford]

I would assume you were not on the Aether datacenter then. They added cross data center travel (ie server transfers but you don't need to exit the game or pay money to do it, you can just hop DCs in about 60 to 90 seconds). Before DC travel, the Aether data center was the one in the US that was known as the raider DC. So when DC travel happened, it created a culture where people would first DC travel to Aether to then join or create raid pugs there, and then at the end of their play session travel back to their home DCs to hang out with their friends or access their house or auctions. So yeah the non-Aether DCs have lots of venue advertisements. You can use this website to see all of the current party finder listings in the game and sort them by datacenter.

There was only like 1 server I could create a character on because square enix is a small indie company that can't afford servers

Yeah. FF14's backend server stuff is infamous. There is an input delay that makes it so that most Western players have to use a mod called XIValexander to reduce the input delay while WoW has instantly responsive controls. For some reason we can only hold 800 transmog items in our glamour wardrobes while WoW just has a true/false toggle for whether or not you ever acquired and soulbound any item in the game and can thus transmog it from your transmog window. Lots of irksome things like that and Square can't seem to be bothered to spend their monthly sub millions to fix it. Earlier this year they botched the implementation of a player blacklist function, where each account still had a unique ID that the modders could sleuth and were able to record a large percentage of the current active playerbase's IDs and collate them into a spreadsheet that let people tell who was an alt of who. Could you imagine if this happened in any other software industry?

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.
I guess I liked the tradeskills, blue mage was cool.

[GhostShiroyama]

There was only like 1 server I could create a character on because square enix is a small indie company that can't afford servers

Yeah. FF14's backend server stuff is infamous. There is an input delay that makes it so that most Western players have to use a mod called XIValexander to reduce the input delay while WoW has instantly responsive controls. For some reason we can only hold 800 transmog items in our glamour wardrobes while WoW just has a true/false toggle for whether or not you ever acquired and soulbound any item in the game and can thus transmog it from your transmog window. Lots of irksome things like that and Square can't seem to be bothered to spend their monthly sub millions to fix it. Earlier this year they botched the implementation of a player blacklist function, where each account still had a unique ID that the modders could sleuth and were able to record a large percentage of the current active playerbase's IDs and collate them into a spreadsheet that let people tell who was an alt of who. Could you imagine if this happened in any other software industry?

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.
I guess I liked the tradeskills, blue mage was cool.

The story from ARR to Endwalker is amazing and does pull you in. One of the best plots I've ever seen in a video game. Just a shame Square Enix dropped the ball on everything else including their community.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.

Mainly an overlap between 1. Millennial Final Fantasy fans who were starved and then got pitched that there was actually hundreds of hours of high production value Final Fantasy stuff for them that they could consume as an almost singleplayer experience (starting with ShB, Yoshida began working hard to add NPC party members and to make it so that you could play the game as singleplayer as much as possible, only needing to group up for the trial boss fights), 2. people in general who wanted a serialized videogame or VN story and finally found a high production value one that was not a gacha (this was pre Genshin and HSR) and was an alternative to Trails and also presented itself with a slightly more "serious" aesthetic instead of straight anime, and 3. retail WoW players who were disappointed in WoW and looking for an alternative game, with FF14 being the highest production value and most supported alternative (compare to SWTOR and GW2 which were clearly in managed decline and not as fancy).

All three groups are currently shrinking. The FF fans and the people who wanted a long serialized story got a conclusive ending with Endwalker and a lot of them unsubbed, and the continuation content has been deemed not as satisfactory as the original storyline so a lot of people aren't coming back for that. The people in group 2 are now exposed to more alternatives (namely high production value gachas like Genshin and HSR), and those series are pumping out story patches and content at a far faster rate than FF14 (2 to 3 hours of new story and a new dungeon and climatic boss fight once every 6 weeks, instead of once every 5 months) and do it for free instead of charging a monthly sub, and also release a new expansion land/planet every year instead of once every 2 years. And then for people in category 3 they are heading back to WoW because it has become very obvious that FF14 is abysmal as an MMO gameplay wise. And FF14 is also struggling to attract gen alphas and other younger people. It's pretty bad when the Dawntrail expansion that costs $50 requires you go through 500 hours of story to reach the new hot thing people are talking about. Or people could instead just play one of those new gacha games with much less catching up to do (Genshin even lets you skip straight to the latest expansion), or buy into the latest Trails arc.

[rusty_shackleford]

Another thing that bothered me, which WoW also does(but worse), is the quad-dip monetization. Buy to play, buy expansions, pay for a subscription, and it has an in-game cash shop. Oh, **** off.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yeah. FF14's backend server stuff is infamous. There is an input delay that makes it so that most Western players have to use a mod called XIValexander to reduce the input delay while WoW has instantly responsive controls. For some reason we can only hold 800 transmog items in our glamour wardrobes while WoW just has a true/false toggle for whether or not you ever acquired and soulbound any item in the game and can thus transmog it from your transmog window. Lots of irksome things like that and Square can't seem to be bothered to spend their monthly sub millions to fix it. Earlier this year they botched the implementation of a player blacklist function, where each account still had a unique ID that the modders could sleuth and were able to record a large percentage of the current active playerbase's IDs and collate them into a spreadsheet that let people tell who was an alt of who. Could you imagine if this happened in any other software industry?

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.
I guess I liked the tradeskills, blue mage was cool.

The story from ARR to Endwalker is amazing and does pull you in. One of the best plots I've ever seen in a video game. Just a shame Square Enix dropped the ball on everything else including their community.

+1. I have made a lot of posts criticizing FF14 and Trails here and I think that has made the uninitiated here think that there are terrible stories, but I wouldn't have bothered with those criticisms unless I was really invested into their stories. They did a lot of things right.

[CornCake]

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.

Mainly an overlap between 1. Millennial Final Fantasy fans who were starved and then got pitched that there was actually hundreds of hours of high production value Final Fantasy stuff for them that they could consume as an almost singleplayer experience (starting with ShB, Yoshida began working hard to add NPC party members and to make it so that you could play the game as singleplayer as much as possible, only needing to group up for the trial boss fights), 2. people in general who wanted a serialized videogame or VN story and finally found a high production value one that was not a gacha (this was pre Genshin and HSR) and was an alternative to Trails and also presented itself with a slightly more "serious" aesthetic instead of straight anime, and 3. retail WoW players who were disappointed in WoW and looking for an alternative game, with FF14 being the highest production value and most supported alternative (compare to SWTOR and GW2 which were clearly in managed decline and not as fancy).

All three groups are currently shrinking. The FF fans and the people who wanted a long serialized story got a conclusive ending with Endwalker and a lot of them unsubbed, and the continuation content has been deemed not as satisfactory as the original storyline so a lot of people aren't coming back for that. The people in group 2 are now exposed to more alternatives (namely high production value gachas like Genshin and HSR), and those series are pumping out story patches and content at a far faster rate than FF14 (2 to 3 hours of new story and a new dungeon and climatic boss fight once every 6 weeks, instead of once every 5 months) and do it for free instead of charging a monthly sub, and also release a new expansion land/planet every year instead of once every 2 years. And then for people in category 3 they are heading back to WoW because it has become very obvious that FF14 is abysmal as an MMO gameplay wise. And FF14 is also struggling to attract gen alphas and other younger people. It's pretty bad when the Dawntrail expansion that costs $50 requires you go through 500 hours of story to reach the new hot thing people are talking about. Or people could instead just play one of those new gacha games with much less catching up to do (Genshin even lets you skip straight to the latest expansion), or buy into the latest Trails arc.

Shadowlands was ******* bad in every point. Raid was mediocre, story was laughable, more bugs than a *****'s ming and ******* furry druids one shotting with convoke in pvp. All was ******. Of course we jumped to ff14, it just made sense.

[GhostShiroyama]

Really didn't understand how FF14 even became so popular, WoW must have really shat the bed.
I guess I liked the tradeskills, blue mage was cool.

The story from ARR to Endwalker is amazing and does pull you in. One of the best plots I've ever seen in a video game. Just a shame Square Enix dropped the ball on everything else including their community.

+1. I have made a lot of posts criticizing FF14 and Trails here and I think that has made the uninitiated here think that there are terrible stories, but I wouldn't have bothered with those criticisms unless I was really invested into their stories. They did a lot of things right.

Yeah they have some things right, but they have also done things wrong. The community is ******* **** and the in game mods are ******* useless.

[CornCake]

The story from ARR to Endwalker is amazing and does pull you in. One of the best plots I've ever seen in a video game. Just a shame Square Enix dropped the ball on everything else including their community.

+1. I have made a lot of posts criticizing FF14 and Trails here and I think that has made the uninitiated here think that there are terrible stories, but I wouldn't have bothered with those criticisms unless I was really invested into their stories. They did a lot of things right.

Yeah they have some things right, but they have also done things wrong. The community is ******* **** and the in game mods are ******* useless.

Nah mate, the mods work they just focus on banning people named drater yag

[GhostShiroyama]

+1. I have made a lot of posts criticizing FF14 and Trails here and I think that has made the uninitiated here think that there are terrible stories, but I wouldn't have bothered with those criticisms unless I was really invested into their stories. They did a lot of things right.

Yeah they have some things right, but they have also done things wrong. The community is ******* **** and the in game mods are ******* useless.

Nah mate, the mods work they just focus on banning people named drater yag

I hope other people can come forward and express the same frustration and anger I have felt from this community. It's inhuman and disgusting how they act, and they think it's acceptable.

[Tangerine]

or an unfiltered version which would easily offend some people

go with that one

Okay, it's a cesspool of sensitive leftist snowfuckingflakes who treat you like absolute **** because they maxed everything to level 100 and never touched a ******* woman in their lives. It's a collection of ******* sadists who have to find entertainment in telling people to off themselves because they can't admit themselves they are insecure fucks.

Is that better? Cause I can keep going.

Needs more slurs.

[GhostShiroyama]

I was reading the steam reviews for this game, curious about the review bombs people have been talking about and I gotta say it's absolutely sickening. Even the developers of this game are speaking of purging lives and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death. This game is developed by ******* vile inhumane monsters FOR vile inhumane monsters. There's no ******* way that any person with a brain stem would play this game or work for this company or buy any product from Square Enix. I said it a while back that this company supports self harm and suicide but nobody listened to me or took me seriously. Now more people are waking up to the fact that this company and this community of deranged lunatics are so ****** in the head. I guess the brain dead wastes of oxygen, the pedophiles and the mentally ****** need an online place to gather together and suck each other off, and Final Fantasy 14 is where the hive mind truly made its nest.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Aside from some LGBTQ supporting comments from Yoshida, it seems that the actual Japanese dev team is oblivious to what is going on. It's just the dangerhair lolcowlizer Kate, a couple of her nepotistic VAs for Dawntrail like Sena, and the English forum mods who are unhinged.

[DecadeRiptide]

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

[Val the Moofia Boss]

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

That's just Asian artistic tastes. Most modern animes and mangas and games with shirtless guys do not draw nipples. It's what is in vogue.

[Stack of Turtles]

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

That's just Asian artistic tastes. Most modern animes and mangas and games with shirtless guys do not draw nipples. It's what is in vogue.

Apparently it IS because of censorship (I'm unclear on the source, presumably there was some law or some major manga studio's company policy on treating male and female nipples the same, possibly due to not understanding the Western cultural context of censoring female nipples), but it became standardized as the expected art style as a result.

[DecadeRiptide]

why do they censor the nipples on characters though. the male character nipples just have a skin texture

That's just Asian artistic tastes. Most modern animes and mangas and games with shirtless guys do not draw nipples. It's what is in vogue.

Sure but the bumps on the characters are still there in the game. In the images you linked they are not

[J1M]

It's the only way to visually tell the gender of an anime character.

[Rezeren]

I was reading the steam reviews for this game, curious about the review bombs people have been talking about and I gotta say it's absolutely sickening. Even the developers of this game are speaking of purging lives and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

What's the story behind the review bombs? And why are the devs giving a toss about Charlie Kirk's death? Wouldn't have thought the Japanese even knew who he was

Haven't played in two years but was thinking of picking the game back up, but if the community (I played mostly solo for the story) and even the devs are demon possessed, I should stay away

[rusty_shackleford]

I was reading the steam reviews for this game, curious about the review bombs people have been talking about and I gotta say it's absolutely sickening. Even the developers of this game are speaking of purging lives and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

What's the story behind the review bombs? And why are the devs giving a toss about Charlie Kirk's death? Wouldn't have thought the Japanese even knew who he was

Haven't played in two years but was thinking of picking the game back up, but if the community (I played mostly solo for the story) and even the devs are demon possessed, I should stay away

They have a western team
community management, localization, support, etc.,

[Shillitron]

> Raid invite for speed dating ERP event

Oh no no..

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I was reading the steam reviews for this game, curious about the review bombs people have been talking about and I gotta say it's absolutely sickening. Even the developers of this game are speaking of purging lives and celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

What's the story behind the review bombs? And why are the devs giving a toss about Charlie Kirk's death? Wouldn't have thought the Japanese even knew who he was

Haven't played in two years but was thinking of picking the game back up, but if the community (I played mostly solo for the story) and even the devs are demon possessed, I should stay away

There have been multiple different waves of review bombs on Dawntrail for different reasons.

When Dawntrail initially came out, it disappointed a lot of people, both for not fulfilling expectations, the lackluster quality of the box, generally unsatisfactory direction with the game, and also a noticeable quality in drop in certain aspects.

The expansion was advertised - both touted by Yoshi-P in livestreams and in the Tural tourism marketing ads - as being a vacation arc. However, that doesn't actually happen and you instead end up with yet another heavy story pontificating about existentialism just like the last two expacs, and it rehashes the exact same philosophy that people have noticed and grown to dislike of "we are all going to die and cease to exist and there is no one True God or afterlife in this world to save us or fix our broken world. The designed antagonists are fighting tooth and claw to save their country from annihilation but they are le bad for doing so when they should just roll over and allow themselves to die while we the protagonists deserve to live because of... reasons.". Personally I sub to FF14 for these serious adventure stories but apparently a lot of people just wanted the vacation arc, of which WoW Dragonflight provided more of that feel.

Krile, one of the members of FF14's main party of heroes the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, was advertised as being a main character in Dawntrail and she would finally get focus and a backstory. However, Krile winds up spending 95% of the expansion as a tertiary character and is just "there".




The first half of the story is about going on a ship overseas to fantasy America which is ruled by a fragile empire. The emperor is old and is holding a tournament to determine who will succeed him. It is weirdly written because the emperor has a flesh and blood son but apparently he was not really a father to him, and two of the other claimants are adopted. It winds up feeling like the tournament is a sham coverup because Gulool Ja Ja did not do his job as a father and as the ruler and has realized too late that his son is evil and cannot be allowed to inherit the throne, and is doing this charade to try to get the adopted Wuk Lamat to become the new ruler without overtly calling attention to this.





The story forces you to aid Wuk Lamat and bends over backwards to make Wuk Lamat win, which not only sucks the tension out of the story when she never fails, but the story also fails to convince you that Wuk Lamat would be a good ruler. She appears to be in her mid 20s but lacks basic knowledge about her would be subjects, and has a childish view of how the world works. This becomes more frustrating when there is a sane, competent claimant right there who many players wished they were supporting instead, but he gets demonized as the narrative for getting engineering degrees and wanting to revolutionize his country rather than wanting his people to continue living in teepees.




They squished two continents - North and South America - into one expansion, with 3 zones in the south and 2 in the North. That will almost certainly be the only zones here we will ever get. Compare that to the base game ARR, which takes place in a smaller region called Eorzea which is the equivalent of Europe, but has 17 zones and 9 more were added in expansions. Tural also only has half a dozen different cultures/societies, while Eorzea had two or three dozen. Eorzea at the start of the game is a far richer setting than Tural which was supposed to be produced at the height of the FF14 team's skill and resources. Tural is also noticeably devoid of conflict between the tribes which makes it feel shallow. It is suspected that the dangerhair localizer Kate might have been responsible for this, given that her predecessor had creative input on FF14 and was even offered to write the Shadowbringers expansion.

The story is very long but the moment to moment experience is overall boring. You can go 5 or 6 hours of just running around talking to people without anything exciting happening. There is a moment where an apocalypse bird breaks out of confinement and is threatening to wipe out villages off of the face of the earth (earlier you had visited a memorial dedicated to the people who sealed it away), but then you just easily kill it with zero casualties and it did nothing. It greatly dampened the tension knowing nothing bad would ever happen.






When you beat the story, there was little else to do or any real reason to stick around. We started going 5 months between patches for only a few hours of content. Meanwhile the game charges a $15 sub, but free to play games like Genshin add a new patch with a few hours of content every 6 weeks, and have more things to do. A lot of people pointed this out on the forums. The endgame grind zone of Occult's Crescent was not added until almost an entire year after the expansion's launch, is not as engaging as prior endgame grind zones, etc.

FF14 was noted (after the studio moved from California to London in Heavensward) for its high caliber of English dub voice actors, who are drawn from British theater and television show talent. There are even a few Game of Thrones actors here. The only other JRPGs with a dub this good are Xenoblade 1 and FF12, which also had theater talent and British actors. But for Dawntrail, we get some American VAs again and they are noticeably amateurish. The main character Wuk Lamat is voiced by a ****** named Sena Bryer who appears to have gotten this role due to tweeting with the current dangerhair localizer of FF14, Kate. Wuk Lamat is now in third place as having the most voicelines of any character in the game across its entire duration, beating a lot of the main party members - the Scions - who were there from the beginning. She is only behind Alisaie and Alphinaud. A lot of people did not like the intontations of delivery of the voice which for the first time ever caused Square to patch in some retakes (most infamously for the second phase climatic final battle when Wuk Lamat breaks into the pocket dimension where you were fighting the final boss).

=====================

That was the first reviewbomb wave. The ones that came after had to do with handling of the patch cycle (too little bang for your buck), but also Kate and Sena Bryer were attacking the customers on twitter, which was a really bad look and unprecedented. The British actors remained professional and kept their mouths shut. And then recently you had Kate on BlueSky and her Charlie Kirk assassination comments.

Again, the devs - as in the actual Japanese programmers, designers, artists, etc - don't know anything about Charlie Kirk. It's the English head of localization Kate who is doing this.

[rusty_shackleford]

Again, the devs - as in the actual Japanese programmers, designers, artists, etc - don't know anything about Charlie Kirk. It's the English head of localization Kate who is doing this.

This is fair, but it's unfair to absolve them of responsibility(I don't know if you are.) It's possible they were, at one point, ignorant of the issue. But the Japanese development team cannot possibly still be ignorant of it, therefore we must assume some level of complicity in the behavior.

I assume I'm not alone in thinking that American companies serving foreign markets are representative of America's public image and therefore should be held to a very high standard with regards to public comments, even from the personal social media of employees.
If the reverse happened there would be a large outcry, again, I'd assume. If an employee for an American company serving Japan shared opinions on Shinzo Abe's assassination beyond his sympathies, he'd probably be terminated before the day is up.

There are a lot of Americans(incl. anyone who is playing English localizations) that are very sensitive to the Japanese to the point of willful ignorance, which is being abused by Japanese companies.