Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

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I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game

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If the 14 reddit is more at the high end, the official forums would be more in the "ultimate clear omegalul disband after i even think you might wipe casual scum" range, based solely on post content, where reddit is up to 80% "look at muh catgril / dagrongal isnt she cute uwu".

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Casuals don't care about the META. Hell, most of them don't even know it exists.

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If we're defining casual as a player who will make no effort to learn anything about the game, or any effort to learn how things work relative to each other, then that might be correct.

But thats usually not what gets referred to as casual. That form of casual player wont play an MMO long enough to know how they even feel about a class.

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so HC playerbase is, likely, somewhere in 10-15% range. No matter how you look at this, HC playerbase, while isn't small, is very far in size from what this poll suggests it to be

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Theres multiple scales of whats considered "hardcore", of which completing "raid" content (which isnt even a raid) is only one.

There are plenty of people who consider themselves hardcore that arent completing savage content, or who have any ability to do savage content.

Play on Hawaii time on Crystal (or in most any MMO in the world right now, or on a timezone that doesnt match the place you live)? You're probably not getting to find groups to do some/a lot of content outside the "world is needlessly panicing itself into oblivion" month and a half we're due to wrap up shortly.

The poll is pretty accurate and quite reflects my opinion on tanks and healers.

GNB and PLD plays well, DRK is on the weaker side, however warrior is a shadow of his former self.
WHM is pretty nice to play with but AST and SCH i just cannot even lvl up due to the how terribly boring they are, i dont see my one single target spell upgraded as anything exciting.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

The thing is, those people criticizing the survey, what form of feedback do they accept if that one wasn't enough? Do they value these forums more as a form of feedback? By their standards these forums would be completely meaningless.

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A poll conducted across the entire playerbase sent to randomly selected players via email (with required-or-incentivised responses so everyone selected will respond) would be a far better representation of what everyone thinks of the game, not just the small intense few that frequent the forums.

Yes, 2700 votes is enough to tell you what a considerable number of people think of the game, but does not tell you whether they are representative of the entire playerbase. Certainly not enough to claim it sufficiently random to have a 95% confidence level that this accurately represents the whole, because it's inherently biased sampling.

This isn't even about the results of the poll, it's about being honest with the maths. If they all left glowing reviews I would still object to it being called a random sample and talking about how many people would be required to guarantee the accuracy of a random sample, because it isn't random. It's an opt-in poll on a single website.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

This isn't even about the results of the poll, it's about being honest with the maths. If they all left glowing reviews I would still object to it being called a random sample and talking about how many people would be required to guarantee the accuracy of a random sample, because it isn't random. It's an opt-in poll on a single website.

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I've responded to this in post prior to the one you've quoted here. And again, I've said from the beginning it's only true for a random sample, this doesn't mean those measurements won't be used (true random sample is usually impossible). It's to give an idea of how truly big a sample of 2700 is and then subjectively consider how accurate the results may be (considering how representative the survey entries are).

Read and respond to my reply prior to the one you've quoted here.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

Read and respond to my reply prior to the one you've quoted here.

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You mean this one?

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Originally Posted by SamRF

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

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I read it. I was already responding to it.

2700 entries means nothing if they're concentrated within one part of a whole.

It's hard to get a truly random sample, but this isn't even an attempt.

If you stood outside a political rally (regardless of which side of politics) and polled attendees on who they wanted to win the election, even if you polled hundreds of thousands of people, you couldn't then use it as proof that 99% of the general population want X to win.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

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No, this one that I posted after the first one as reply to you. (quoted you as well, looks like you've missed it)

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Originally Posted by SamRF

I mean, I've literally said in that post that it's only truly the case if you have a random sample. However, as I've also said, true random sampling is usually impossible. This doesn't mean that those statistical measurements won't be used or taken into consideration (they would be useless if it only gave meaningful information for true random sample). It's not accurate but gives you an idea of what the true accuracy would be when you afterwards take into account how representative the survey entries are.

It's true you need more surveys to confirm this and some results may be up to interpretation but 2700 entries is still quite a lot, imo you can't say the results are meaningless with such large amount of entries assuming vast majority of those were indeed from active FFXIV players (which is a fairly safe assumption to make). Consider that this survey reached more people from the population than many actual (scientific) researchers (any topic) ever hope to be able to reach for their study. It's more than valid material to work with and perhaps right now the best source of feedback for the developers considering the alternative feedback mediums. (It's much better information than the usual feedback on these forums with a thread with perhaps 100 likes or a couple users going back and forth on an issue.)

The fact that it's by far more hardcore players you reach instead of casuals isn't that problematic imo, because casuals likely don't care nearly as much about job satisfaction as those "hardcore" who spend much more time in the game.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

If you stood outside a political rally (regardless of which side of politics) and polled attendees on who they wanted to win the election, even if you polled hundreds of thousands of people, you couldn't then use it as proof that 99% of the general population want X to win.

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Never understood this line of reasoning. Like the election, not everyone is allowed or feels inclined to vote either. Plus the opinions on the poll are varied and aren't as biased as you'd see from a group that supports one figure/cause.

Feedback is taken when people actively do it. If they wanted feedback from absolutely everyone, they could've messaged mass surveys to everyone right now. If we go to specifics, that would probably be way too much information to go through since the game has about hundredth thousands of active players. Information like this is still credible even if it's a small part of the community.

Most of healer complaints have nothing to do with a specific healer not being meta, but rather how boring and similar to each other they are to play.

Too much downtime to fill with 1-2 button spam.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

It's true you need more surveys to confirm this and some results may be up to interpretation but 2700 entries is still quite a lot, imo you can't say the results are meaningless with such large amount of entries assuming vast majority of those were indeed from active FFXIV players (which is a fairly safe assumption to make).

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As I already said: 2700 is a lot on its own, but it doesn't matter how many players you poll if those players are not a cross-section of the entire game population. Thus my example about the political rally - you can poll every single person in attendance about their preferred political party, and gather far more responses than you would need for a reliable random sample, but if your sample isn't random then no sheer number of responses will make it an accurate representation of the whole population.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

The fact that it's by far more hardcore players you reach instead of casuals isn't that problematic imo, because casuals likely don't care nearly as much about job satisfaction as those "hardcore" who spend much more time in the game.

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You're assuming here that hardcore players' opinion of how the jobs should work is the best one that would be appreciated by everyone. It isn't, necessarily.

Case in point (which has already been raised in this thread just above) is healer complexity. It's a constant complaint here that only having one attack button is terrible and boring.

Personally, coming from console games mostly, one attack button is normal. Having a one-two-three combo spread across three buttons is needlessly wasteful of buttons, and the overall number of skills is immense. I'd rather have less skills than more, and have the complexity come from the game environment or the fight. Also I know for a fact that I tend to "tunnel-vision" when following a DPS rotation, and and making healers do that would be a surefire way to make me do a terrible job of either healing, DPSing, or both. (I do miss Aero 3 though.)

Is my opinion common? I don't know. But increasing the complexity level to suit the small number of people asking for it might have a negative effect on job satisfaction for others. People who are happy with the current gameplay are inherently not going to be complaining about it.

Edit to add: The "one button is boring" complaints also overlook the fact that you are doing that while monitoring your party's status and breaking to cast healing spells when needed. One mindless skill is exactly what I want when my mind is on other things.

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Originally Posted by dinnertime

Never understood this line of reasoning. Like the election, not everyone is allowed or feels inclined to vote either. Plus the opinions on the poll are varied and aren't as biased as you'd see from a group that supports one figure/cause.

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I'm not saying the poll is as biased as that hypothetical one would be. Just an extreme example of why "we polled a large number of people" doesn't guarantee that the result means anything if you didn't poll the right selection of people.

Also, while it's not really relevant to the example either way, voting is compulsory in some countries.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

Most of healer complaints have nothing to do with a specific healer not being meta, but rather how boring and similar to each other they are to play.

Too much downtime to fill with 1-2 button spam.

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It's not even a 1 2 button spam. It's 1 button every 30 seconds and 11-12 casts of your filler spell.

Such riveting gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Personally, coming from console games mostly, one attack button is normal. Having a one-two-three combo spread across three buttons is needlessly wasteful of buttons,

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You know how other games get around button bloat for things like that? By making combos on 1 button. Many have been asking for this in FFXIV for a while but the developers refuse to do it in the main game but have no problem doing it for PvP which very few people play.

The system is there, SE refuses to implement it in the core game.

I have polled a section of the player community - namely folks in my FC, folks in my hunt linkshell, cross world linkshell, people of my friends list, folk on the various XIV discords - and the only complaints about jobs I received were that SMN is too busy and DNC relies too much on getting procs. When I say 'polled', I mean I asked if they had any complaints about the jobs they mained, already a loaded question. Obviously i didn't get 2000 odd replies - more like 200 - but most who replied said they were having fun with their jobs. Some healers - myself included - are actually happy with the healer changes because the last thing we want or need is a complex DPS rotation.

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

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Originally Posted by Elladie

I have polled a section of the player community - namely folks in my FC, folks in my hunt linkshell, cross world linkshell, people of my friends list, folk on the various XIV discords - and the only complaints about jobs I received were that SMN is too busy and DNC relies too much on getting procs. When I say 'polled', I mean I asked if they had any complaints about the jobs they mained, already a loaded question. Obviously i didn't get 2000 odd replies - more like 200 - but most who replied said they were having fun with their jobs. Some healers - myself included - are actually happy with the healer changes because the last thing we want or need is a complex DPS rotation.

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

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Actually, most seem fairly satisfied if you look at the actual results of the poll. Remember OP of this thread is simply making couple interpretations and assumptions based on the data. Monk is the only job with below half (2.4/5) score. Scholar is 2nd least satisfied job and has 2.9/5 score.

Some here seem to just assume the poll results are vastly negative towards the current game, perhaps without looking at the actual poll.

Here are some graphs: https://imgur.com/a/ymqa7ju

the main one:
https://i.imgur.com/5AnCF5v.png

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Originally Posted by Iscah

As I already said: 2700 is a lot on its own, but it doesn't matter how many players you poll if those players are not a cross-section of the entire game population. Thus my example about the political rally - you can poll every single person in attendance about their preferred political party, and gather far more responses than you would need for a reliable random sample, but if your sample isn't random then no sheer number of responses will make it an accurate representation of the whole population.

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Of course you won't get an accurate representation of the whole population, but you simply get an idea of what the actual data would be. That's the whole point of statistics, there are very few scenarios in which you can get anything close to a random sample. It will be subjective but I strongly believe 2700 is a lot, when I'm comparing it to other survey results that are being used all the time which have fewer entries and a much bigger population and taken by imo even less random samples. Imo you can't see 2700 of the 600 000 taken from the most popular forum of the game (reddit), as meaningless. Comparing Reddit to a onesided political rally is a really bad analogy imo, Reddit will be far more representative than that.

In your opinion not too much but in my opinion it's representative enough to give meaningful data and best information Devs may have gotten in a while (compared to other mediums of feedback). Interpretation of a survey, the statistics and how representative you deem it to be will always be subjective in the end so it's up to you how much you'll trust it. If you personally don't trust it enough to be meaningful, it's fine.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

Of course you won't get an accurate representation of the whole population, but you simply get an idea of what the actual data would be. That's the whole point of statistics, there are very few scenarios in which you can get anything close to a random sample. It will be subjective but I strongly believe 2700 is a lot, when I'm comparing it to other survey results that are being used all the time which have fewer entries and a much bigger population and taken by imo even less random samples. Imo you can't see 2700 of the 600 000 taken from the most popular forum of the game (reddit), as meaningless. Comparing Reddit to a onesided political rally is a really bad analogy imo, Reddit will be far more representative than that.

In your opinion not too much but in my opinion it's representative enough to give meaningful data and best information Devs may have gotten in a while (compared to other mediums of feedback). Interpretation of a survey, the statistics and how representative you deem it to be will always be subjective in the end so it's up to you how much you'll trust it. If you personally don't trust it enough to be meaningful, it's fine.

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Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.


63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.


Also the fact that the majority of people said they are unhappy with their place in the meta, when at the moment, almost no one should care, is just silly.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.

63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.

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Okay, does that mean the poll is meaningless? It's great that this info gives us a better idea of what portion of the population the entries consist of. What you can do now is take the hardcore entries of that survey and generalize them to the the known amount of hardcore players (let's say 10%). Then you generalize the remaining 37% casual entries of that post to known amount of casuals (90%) of the playerbase and you might have a better idea of the actual results. This means you'll get a much more accurate picture of job satisfaction of hardcore players and a lesser but imo still good picture of casual players their job satisfaction. If you add up these 2 generalized datasets, you'll get a more accurate idea of job satisfaction of the whole population.

I think you'll get much more feedback from hardcore players no matter what, in any form of feedback. Most casuals likely aren't nearly as invested and won't waste their time.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Its not, simply by the fact of comparing the data from the poll to the data we have elsewhere.


63% of the poll say they do savage content, while the census shows that to be around 20% at the highest, and 5% at the lowest.


Also the fact that the majority of people said they are unhappy with their place in the meta, when at the moment, almost no one should care, is just silly.

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The way the poll was phrased was actually "Do you do Extreme/Savage content?" and classified both as hardcore, which inflated that number significantly when there's quite a few people who do Extremes for mounts/weapon for glamour but otherwise wouldn't engage with it. While it would be a misnomer to call that "Hardcore" the information is still valid among that particular cohort of players.

The survey itself also isn't problematic for having a disproportionate number of players who do Extreme/Savage respondents anyway. You can look at the aggregate data that examines the overall satisfaction of the survey, but you can also look at the separate satisfaction of people who do Extreme/Savage and Casual players as individual groups.

Edit: Also you can go in and look at the individual responses to see what the complaints are job by job. Generalizing and dismissing the entire poll because some people care too much about the meta is ignoring useful information, especially when they'd cite that as a complaint even though they were ranked 4/5. For example Monk, the lowest ranking job in satisfaction amongst any player population broadly didn't care about its Meta Position. Monk players were instead disappointed by the lack luster new additions to the jobs kit in Shadowbringers and the way previous skills had been altered (or as the poll listed them "New abilities" and "Changes to old abilities").

If nothing else, this poll is another point of data that can be used alongside other information that's available such as job's play rates in dungeons/trials/raids/etc and the previously mentioned Lucky Banchou Player Census to determine how players are feeling about specific jobs or roles. To continue beating the dead horse that is Monk as an example, the amount of play it sees in Expert Dungeons, normal raids, normal trials, and the copied factory is at the absolute bottom of all jobs by a huge margin which coupled with this poll and the general feedback you see about it in the DPS forums, Reddit, and elsewhere suggest there's an extreme distaste for it from the playerbase.

I'd also like to see a more formalized official means of providing feedback to the developers such as an in game poll about job satisfaction. The official forums and reddit are still going to be subject to a degree of bias in their own ways. Neither is going to be truly representative of the playerbase as a whole and the feedback in either of them is going to trend negative because people who are unhappy are more likely to speak up. The best way they could gather feedback would be in game from the players, or through the launcher or something.

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Originally Posted by Elladie

Please don't presume that because a sample on Reddit/these forums are unhappy with some changes, that's in any way representative of the general opinion. As Iscah says, a poll conducted by SE that selected players at random - or even by number based on different criteria such as 200 from different regions, 200 long term players, 200 sprouts, 200 returners etc etc etc - is far more likely to be unbiased (Because it isn't taking data from a specified, single group of people) than either mine or the Reddit one

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It's not a representative of the general opinion, sure, but where else would they find feedback for the game? Again, if they wanted an official poll, they would've done it and they should, but right now this is what it is.

Looking back, the forums have talked about the following 'issues' within Shadowbringers and the dev team has addressed them. Examples being: Scholar's Energy Drain, Ninja and Summoner's high APM, Low DPS of all the Ranged Jobs (Physical Ranged still being problematic), Bard losing Bard attributes, Monk's Greased Lightning uptime problem (somewhat), Gunbreaker sound issues, The Firmament exploit etc. Opinions here, even though we're a small margin of the community, is definitely not meaningless.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

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I agree with most of this, and I miss Manashift (since that was BLMs only support skill beyond the shield skill we had) but I don't miss the 'party-wide enmity management' which made tanks into divas. I miss my agro dump skills but many many tanks abused this system in order to squeeze out more dps. I high end it was a given but in lower end content, if you accidentally ripped aggro, a lot of tanks would just let you die or if you started creeping up the list they'd shirk you. I'm glad tanks are the only ones who deal with enmity now. This is as it should be. The rest of the poll I pretty much agree with.

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Originally Posted by Ursa_Vonfiebryd

I'm glad tanks are the only ones who deal with enmity now. This is as it should be.

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The problem is they don't actually.

If SE stopped at just removing enmity dumps from DPS/healers I'd agree with you - the system where aggro management was mostly on anyone but the tanks was stupid - but they've also removed all threat management from tanks themselves at the same time and buffed the new, cost-less tank stances so hard, that it's near impossible for tanks to lose aggro unless they die. I'd say this certainly isn't as it should be.

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Originally Posted by Satarn

The problem is they don't actually.

If SE stopped at just removing enmity dumps from DPS/healers I'd agree with you - the system where aggro management was mostly on anyone but the tanks was stupid - but they've also removed all threat management from tanks themselves at the same time and buffed the new, cost-less tank stances so hard, that it's near impossible for tanks to lose aggro unless they die. I'd say this certainly isn't as it should be.

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And yet, my friends and I still rip hate off tanks in lvl 80 dungeons....

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

dungeons....

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I wouldn't call getting aggro from some stragglers during pull "ripping hate".

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Originally Posted by Satarn

I wouldn't call getting aggro from some stragglers during pull "ripping hate".

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yeah.. thats not what i meant. but nice try.

Its super easy to generalize about things. See, what I meant was "we pull hate off BAD tanks all the time." You took that to mean, any and all tanks.

Thats why we have this lowest common denominator thing, where enmity isn't really a thing anymore. I can't count how many times I'd use all of my enmity dumps and STILL have hate. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that any more.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Case in point (which has already been raised in this thread just above) is healer complexity. It's a constant complaint here that only having one attack button is terrible and boring.

Personally, coming from console games mostly, one attack button is normal. Having a one-two-three combo spread across three buttons is needlessly wasteful of buttons, and the overall number of skills is immense. I'd rather have less skills than more, and have the complexity come from the game environment or the fight. Also I know for a fact that I tend to "tunnel-vision" when following a DPS rotation, and and making healers do that would be a surefire way to make me do a terrible job of either healing, DPSing, or both. (I do miss Aero 3 though.)

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I completely agree. I play Halo CE on PC and there are only 3 buttons to do damage and it's plenty fun. Having to press 20 buttons to do damage is not really fun and engaging for me, it's needless busiwork that makes it harder for me to switch between classes. I can agree with others however that only have one button to do damage against a static bullet sponge would be terribly boring if there's very little player engagement or risk involved. If there's nothing more going on then just standing still and pushing one button repeatedly, then that's a problem.

I personally like "button bloat" and getting creative with keybinding slot scheme and UI. I'd love to have even more abilities than we have right now for every job. I know more abilities doesn't equal more interesting gameplay or depth but I just like having many buttons to manage. Reminds me of playing an instrument (piano).

If you think 3 buttons is in anyway fun, challenging or engaging for the majority of those fitted with a brain, you should try getting out more and experiencing past times that take a modicum of effort. I grow weary of the snore fest, without being told that even partially engaging myself is the norm. Sorry if thats brash or offensive but enough is enough. The pace of this game, compared to the prior generation of MMO's or even your comparison to console is already somewhere akin to baywatch slow-run speed. If it continues to get any more tedious (and no 1% of end content is not sufficient engagement) then I imagine that 'unsatisfied' poll that has already reared its head, will grow exponentially. Classically these games are supposed to have depth of rotation to offset the thought vs reaction time differential in mmo gaming /compared to alternative genres. Without that consideration here, the sense of satisfaction in gameplay is nill for a good majority I imagine.

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Originally Posted by Edax

I completely agree. I play Halo CE on PC and there are only 3 buttons to do damage and it's plenty fun.

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. I really hope you appreciate the difference between a FPS and a tab target MMO.

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Originally Posted by althenawhm

. I really hope you appreciate the difference between a FPS and a tab target MMO.

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I only had to click on a enemy to attack them in Runescape, it was still fun. No button presses. It was all about resource management there.

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Originally Posted by Mindiori

If you think 3 buttons is in anyway fun, challenging or engaging for the majority of those fitted with a brain, you should try getting out more and experiencing past times that take a modicum of effort. I grow weary of the snore fest, without being told that even partially engaging myself is the norm. Sorry if thats brash or offensive but enough is enough. The pace of this game, compared to the prior generation of MMO's or even your comparison to console is already somewhere akin to baywatch slow-run speed. If it continues to get any more tedious (and no 1% of end content is not sufficient engagement) then I imagine that 'unsatisfied' poll that has already reared its head, will grow exponentially. Classically these games are supposed to have depth of rotation to offset the thought vs reaction time differential in mmo gaming /compared to alternative genres. Without that consideration here, the sense of satisfaction in gameplay is nill for a good majority I imagine.

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Not that I want a 1-3 button rotation, but.... Did you play old mmos? I seem to remember them being quite slow.

Ideally, there should be a good balance between classes that have a lot of buttons to press and those who have other elements to deal with. This would be a nice, and fairly simple, way for SE to provide more diversity in it's class pool. There would be nothing wrong with having, for example, two healers that direct heal if one had a more complicated series of buttons to use and one who had less buttons but harsher resource management.

Adding more complexity to the fights is great but there is only so much they can do before things get just plain stupid in that regard so you can't rely on just fight mechanics to make things "interesting." Every fight doesn't and shouldn't need to be Ultimate (or Savage or EX) level complexity. The classes should feel fun and fulfilling regardless of what sort of content you're up against.

Personally, I enjoy less of a reliance on a ton of buttons and more on resource management, which is a large part of why I enjoy RDM and SAM. I do definitely agree, though, that playing WHM is boring.. and I don't even heal often.

Love shout to Paladin for having a button that enables another button you can only press once per minute. What a disgrace.

Yeah FFXIV can do a way better job of making some of the existing buttons more meaningful, or when multiple buttons are only available in opposing contexts, just have them share space. Like, to go with the example above, why not have Atonement and Mom's Confetti share a button? If you have the Kitty Cat buff up that means you started the sequence at 90%+ MP, which means you are casting spells, which means a weaponskill is the last thing you are thinking of. Also the Gnashing Fang sequence is 4 buttons you can use only twice in a minute. Feint and Addle are cool in boss battles but they at minimum need the Reprisal treatment if we want them to feel meaningful for dungeon trash.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Not that I want a 1-3 button rotation, but.... Did you play old mmos? I seem to remember them being quite slow.

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The cooldown and pacing of this game, lends itself toward a deeper rotation and potential skill depth. I suppose some might view that as 'tactical planning' of a sort, as apposed to reflex speed. If you remove the rotational complexity in this game without giving back (as has been the case thus far) you end up appealing to nobody sans the candy-crush brigade.

I primarily came from a Korean PvP background. Naturally I shelved that competitively for this game, with no issue - as my free time is now split on various other endeavours (away from gaming). The speed of Aion Online in its day; is perhaps around comparable to what I am referencing although there are many others. Around 30 keybinds, some bloat yes and an older generation of game design but without the delay present in the majority of ff until end ex. I gravitated toward Monk somewhat in this game for its 'play pace'; so as you might imagine, its neglect bothers me. Most classes in this game leave me short on my APM. I'm waiting essentially for the game to keep up with me.

Don't misread however, I accept FFXIV for what it is. I don't expect it to match the pace of my prior experience. But there has to be some sort of compromise for challenge. Making it into the next WoW post streamlining; is exactly the reason Classic had its vast appeal. People disliked some of the old but having the depth of a puddle, doesn't leave you with much 'purposeful accomplishment' and people were sick of it. As I've noted other posters around here referencing, similar to yourself; you reach a point where simplicity reaches redundancy and reward becomes meaningless.

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Originally Posted by Mindiori

The cooldown and pacing of this game, lends itself toward a deeper rotation and potential skill depth. I suppose some might view that as 'tactical planning' of a sort, as apposed to reflex speed. If you remove the rotational complexity in this game without giving back (as has been the case thus far) you end up appealing to nobody sans the candy-crush brigade.

I primarily came from a Korean PvP background. Naturally I shelved that competitively for this game, with no issue - as my free time is now split on various other endeavours (away from gaming). The speed of Aion Online in its day; is perhaps around comparable to what I am referencing although there are many others. Around 30 keybinds, some bloat yes and an older generation of game design but without the delay present in the majority of ff until end ex. I gravitated toward Monk somewhat in this game for its 'play pace'; so as you might imagine, its neglect bothers me. Most classes in this game leave me short on my APM. I'm waiting essentially for the game to keep up with me.

Don't misread however, I accept FFXIV for what it is. I don't expect it to match the pace of my prior experience. But there has to be some sort of compromise for challenge. Making it into the next WoW post streamlining; is exactly the reason Classic had its vast appeal. People disliked some of the old but having the depth of a puddle, doesn't leave you with much 'purposeful accomplishment' and people were sick of it. As I've noted other posters around here referencing, similar to yourself; you reach a point where simplicity reaches redundancy and reward becomes meaningless.

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I dunno about this lack of complexity thing. Sure, rotations may be static, in a vacuum, but you have to adjust when the boss force disengages you. I have almost 36 skills slotted on my main. Maybe you are just playing the wrong job?

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

yeah.. thats not what i meant. but nice try.

Its super easy to generalize about things. See, what I meant was "we pull hate off BAD tanks all the time." You took that to mean, any and all tanks.

Thats why we have this lowest common denominator thing, where enmity isn't really a thing anymore. I can't count how many times I'd use all of my enmity dumps and STILL have hate. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that any more.

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And this why people are complaining about job design; particularly healers. They've been designed for that lowest common denominator which makes for less compelling gameplay for everyone else. Instead of improving one of the few tank mechanics, they abandoned it entirely because some people can't be bothered to learn how it works. Likewise, healers are reduced to spamming a single button due to not wanting to make things "too hard" yet even Savage barely pushes their healing kit. Maybe the dev team should stop worrying about Timmy who thinks Cure III is a better healer than Cure II because three comes after two.

The problem with one-button attacks on healers is because there is nothing complex about healer jobs. Free healing is practically given like candy, and encounters don't exactly test healers in healing like the devs claimed. They've stripped the complexity of all the healers with how much they've reworked them.

They don't necessarily need a 3-button combo but a toolkit that works well with each other to make doing damage a bit more engaging. Old-school Scholar is a good example because you have Broil, two DoTs, Bane to spread those DoTs, Miasma III, Shadowflare and Energy Drain to use. Most of that is now stripped away and it's boring.

They can also be complex in other areas that isn't about damage. Astrologian's old card system while had its problems, had a lot of depth in it. The various effects you can use and how they can be applied (Longer duration, Double potency or as a party-wide effect) was engaging. Now it's all one predictable buff with no way to manipulate how it's applied, that's boring.

Even the simplest healer, White Mage, had complexity stripped away because of how many instant ogcd heals it has on hand. All of the healers do, actually. It trivializes healing so much especially when again, encounters in the game aren't exactly intense on healing.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

And this why people are complaining about job design; particularly healers. They've been designed for that lowest common denominator which makes for less compelling gameplay for everyone else. Instead of improving one of the few tank mechanics, they abandoned it entirely because some people can't be bothered to learn how it works. Likewise, healers are reduced to spamming a single button due to not wanting to make things "too hard" yet even Savage barely pushes their healing kit. Maybe the dev team should stop worrying about Timmy who thinks Cure III is a better healer than Cure II because three comes after two.

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The game will never be super complex. It's not really the audience it caters towards. I've accepted that. I do savage, and most of the other content it provides. I'm glad I don't have to worry about some of that though, it let's me play other games, which I also enjoy.

I feel like a lot of people only want to play xiv, and while I understand that, I think the world is moving away from that kind of game.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

The game will never be super complex. It's not really the audience it caters towards. I've accepted that. I do savage, and most of the other content it provides. I'm glad I don't have to worry about some of that though, it let's me play other games, which I also enjoy.

I feel like a lot of people only want to play xiv, and while I understand that, I think the world is moving away from that kind of game.

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Yet so far in Shadowbringers, people are complaining about a lack of casual content. Very strange.
And the complaints aren't necessarily about adding more complexity into the game, but more about bringing back the complexity they stripped away anyway.

If anything, it's alienation to the people who are already used to it. I don't think most people like the changes because it's been such a hot topic ever since the expansion came out.

With regards to healer and buttons and stuff, while there is a debate towards the gameplay experience of the current card system, I think AST is on the right track despite its infamy: a little more to keep you engaged when the damage isn't coming in.

Basically, I'd like to see them do something to make the healers more engaging when you aren't healing. I think if it's too clunky like AST on Shadowbringers release, it will turn people off, so nothing quite that extreme. It can't be such that your job hinges on it, because it has to be able to operate in the hand of someone new to healing or under crisis. SCH in Stormblood was close to what I'd like: it was kind of like a "DPS Lite", with some DoTs to keep up and a trait with some forward feedback on your oGCD spell. I don't think Scholar in 6.0 has to have its Stormblood kit back, but I'd like if they could make it more involved.

WHM... not sure. I don't mind there being a super basic healer. I find it too boring to play, but as someone who mains WAR I respect there being a very simple healer for those who want one. Like if they did something to make lillies more interesting, like maybe if attacking would cause them to flourish a little more quickly.


On the topic of healers, I'd like them to maybe take another look at what MP means. MP and Piety are kind of meh design-wise. I like that in PvP they went with a direction of making your back attack spell and heal free and I think it could be applied to PvE; it could certainly help justifying the existence of the tier 1 healing spells if they were made free, and MP was made into a more exciting resource. Like if some of the oGCDs had a hefty MP cost in addition to their CD, it could make actually stopping to cast spells more enticing. Just something worth thinking about for the next expansion.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

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Not a single job met that 400 respondent threshold. This was 2,867 respondents across all jobs, with some jobs receiving more than 100 fewer responses than others. This makes the margin of error much larger, and not very representative of the population of the game as a whole, even when you consider that the number of responses they got was lower than the population of every server...

But to break it down by number of responses per job:

AST: 202
BRD: 153
BLM : 142
DNC: 159
DRK: 182
DRG: 169
GUN: 148
MCH: 163
MNK: 125
PLD: 167
RDM: 188
SAM: 150
SCH: 230
SUM: 163
WAR: 124
WHM: 250

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

WHM... not sure. I don't mind there being a super basic healer. I find it too boring to play, but as someone who mains WAR I respect there being a very simple healer for those who want one. Like if they did something to make lillies more interesting, like maybe if attacking would cause them to flourish a little more quickly.

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White Mage needs an attack that consumes lilies because typically you want to consume them ASAP for Afflatus Misery, but there will be times where there's no need for the heal.

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Originally Posted by dinnertime

Yet so far in Shadowbringers, people are complaining about a lack of casual content. Very strange.
And the complaints aren't necessarily about adding more complexity into the game, but more about bringing back the complexity they stripped away anyway.

If anything, it's alienation to the people who are already used to it. I don't think most people like the changes because it's been such a hot topic ever since the expansion came out.

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People complain about everything everyday since the beginning of the world and they will never stop.

No matter what SE will do, there will be new party of users who will come to say their "Pah!". At the same time people who likes things or simply doesn't care and plays hovewer it's done tend to stay quiet because "Why say something if I like everything as it is?" mentality is common all over the world. Sooooo, no, just because some topic is hot doesn't mean that it represents what majority of players thinks. Let's take Male Viera thread, going away from actual gameplay. Is the topic hot? Oh yeah, it is - the main post even got 1800+ likes which barely happened on this forum (if happened before at all). Does it mean that majority cares? Nope, majority is okay either they do add them or not as long as they can play the game and wouldn't bother if this addition never happens because they don't lose anything. And I say it as somebody who is in "pro-Viera" camp.

Every time I see complains about the game in let's say novice network - they're from same 3-5 people and are so repetitive that I'm having deja vu every time I open the chat, and on top of that some tend to start yapping if somebody dares to say that they like some job's gameplay in its new form which... doesn't attract more people to say positive things, to say the least. Same goes to every other source of opinion - there is a very high chance that you will see same nicknames in comment sections. It doesn't mean that this opinion isn't valid or is meaningless. It's just that it's not represetantive, because the real majority simply doesn't talk because they like things the way they are and don't bother themselves to go out of their way to say it.

AST changes (as example)? Happened thanks to one minority asking for changes, just as any other job balancing change. Result? We see it on this forum - another minority is unhappy. Meanwhile, the majority just plays the game and enjoys their time in it. Also keep in mind that at least some part of the development team, including Yoshida, plays the game themselves, so they aren't blind to how things work in the final product.