Breaking the Majority’s Silence: A Job Criticism Thread

I dont care about balance I'm probably only going to play the same job no matter what happens, please just inject SOUL into jobs.

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Originally Posted by Shikiseki

I love how everyone claims that the opinons voiced here are "a loud minority" and the major silent majority in game always thinks the game is a-ok.

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The point really is there is no evidence either way.

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

I am part of the silent majority, I do not think like you. I think the game is fine. It is not good idea talk in the name of other people...

Majority of people do not post this forum or any other place. The number and the sub numbers it is what matters, and it is very high, that's the answer. Those are the silent majority. The ones who still play but no say a single thing. Nothing talks more than the money, people spent a lot of money in this game.

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This is the most accurate post in this thread right here. Money talks far more than actual words. I've been here over 8 years. I still play when I have the free time(I work 10 hours a day though so time is getting harder to find anymore).

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The point really is there is no evidence either way.

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Not entirely true. We have evidence that the jobs have been homogenized, and somewhat intentionally, for the sake of the raiding community. And we also have dozens of threads here and on reddit complaining of the removal of unique skills and the homogenization of jobs, with very few threads actually praising current job design.

We will never have *conclusive* evidence, but equating that with no evidence is just bad critical analysis and sophistry.

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Originally Posted by SeverianLyonesse

Not entirely true. We have evidence that the jobs have been homogenized, and somewhat intentionally, for the sake of the raiding community. And we also have dozens of threads here and on reddit complaining of the removal of unique skills and the homogenization of jobs, with very few threads actually praising current job design.

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All of these posts and all reddit posts could be the work of a vocal minority, though.

The people everyone says they know in their FC complaining about homogenization or job design could also be a minority. All the burned out veteran players and achievement hunters could be a minority next to all those sprouts, returners and casual players logging in to do MSQ.

That is actually why a form to ask people why they are unsubscribing is about the best thing that can be done and if they just refuse to fill it out, then unfortunately it may be difficult to ever be completely sure what the "silent majority" think.

You may think "we could poll the majority", but how do you know that the ones answering aren't just that minority of veterans who play the game too much like I do?

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Originally Posted by Fahrih

As mentioned in the inspiration video, this game has always had a problem with the Vocal Minority Vs the Silent Majority; the loud people that want change, and the quiet people simply content with what’s currently there, who don’t see a reason to provide feedback if that feedback is nothing more than “yeah I like it.” And yet that feedback does have value, because if the vocal minority talks trash about what the silent majority wants to stay, the devs are going to change it, because they hear “thing bad” and not a single “thing good”.

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What you are doing isn't really fixing the problem. The problem is the feedback loop itself. Every change that is critiqued has been followed by "Well this is what the players wanted". However, said people can never point to a past source on said feedback that gained any amount of notable traction (actually nobody points to any past source at all!). CBU3 needs to be better at filtering feedback and gaining proper player feedback to make changes.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

And Im sorry but your take didn't prove me wrong but good attempt though. You are free to disagree but that here is all you proved was that you disagreed. You failed to prove why I was wrong.

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I didn't disagree with you, I contrasted obvious examples of jobs that "support" your claim with examples of jobs that have good job identity and are in the grand scheme of things balanced at Lv90, highlighting that the game can in fact reasonably sustain job identity and job balance. If you can't see why your statement was wrong based on clear examples of jobs with good job identity + job balance coexisting, then I don't know man I'm not a therapist.

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Originally Posted by TomsYoungerBro

The problem is the feedback loop itself.

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Indeed. "Give paladin a gap closer". Now all tanks have gap closers and are homogenized. "Stop homogenizing tanks" (implying it should be reversed). It's an endless loop.

A lot of people talked about DRK needing more self-heals in Abyssos which would homogenize it more, yet at the same time there was criticism of tanks being homogenized.

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Every change that is critiqued has been followed by "Well this is what the players wanted". However, said people can never point to a past source on said feedback that gained any amount of notable traction (actually nobody points to any past source at all!).

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Honestly, no proof of said feedback would do it justice. You just had to be around back then and see what everyone was saying in the game and how everything played. If you were around in Heavensward, you knew an awful lot was janky, useless or impractical such as Parry, Foresight, Paladin blocks only working against physical attacks. All of those and Raw Intuition got "homogenized" to be like Rampart (or removed in Foresight's case) to allow them to mitigate magic.

Yet, that was solving a problem people wanted solving because the bosses then were doing a lot of magic attacks.

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CBU3 needs to be better at filtering feedback and gaining proper player feedback to make changes.

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True. I have seen MMORPG developers do this much better before but there wasn't a language barrier in those cases. Nevertheless, Google Translate exists and would work well enough if it would improve communication.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The point really is there is no evidence either way.

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Essentially the only safe assumption that can be made statistically is that the majority of the player base is not 100% happy with the game. However the specifics of what they don't like about the game vary from player to player. The issue is the majority of players not 100% happy with the game either do not feel the need to be vocal about it or just simply aren't using things like this forum/reddit/insert whatever other platform here/ to complain about it. This results in noisy minorities ending up with more influence than they should have in a number of cases which just leads to even more issues when companies present data with incorrect context in order to convince people the changes they made to silence the noise made everything better.

The point of that video was to say that the community needs to find compromise no matter what. It wasn't really saying that X group is the majority, or X group is the minority. It was saying that Square Enix is getting mixed signals from everyone's feedback, and that there needs to be a better way to approach it in the future.

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

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Originally Posted by Straticus

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

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People are rightfully concerned that jobs will be further pruned of their complexity, as they have been gradually over the past few expansions. Another job pruned of complexity is another job people want reverted.

Job complexity and encounter complexity are not a binary choice. Why do people treat things in this game like they're binary choices...

You can have both job complexity and fight complexity. There's no justification for sacrificing one or both outside of that coveted "accessibility," and it doesn't take a deep dive to see how people tend to view that reason...

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Originally Posted by Straticus

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

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People asking for a degree of job complexity to return to some of their jobs aren't asking for skillsets that require a PhD on that subject to figure out, we kinda just want basic things like DRK's blood and MP interacting with each other again. Or them stopping to add abilities that are just gated by a cooldown and only do a potency number and thats it.

Love you citing BLM btw, you know what sets BLM's Thunder apart from many other jobs? It is a multi-purpose tool with an interesting management tied to it - it is the most well-designed DoT in all jobs because its more than a DoT.

I don't want every job to be BLM - I want jobs to have a meaningful minigame again, be it slinging DoTs with different durations (SB Whm + Sch, HW Sch + Smn), having resource gauges interacting with each other (StB Drk MP-Blood using TBN, Delirium, Quietus etc), actual resource management like keeping beast gauge high for more crit rate ...

...or at very least not have my job identity neutered each expansion and/or neutralized from a tradition of overbuffing a job until mine reaches "what do you even excel at" status and theirs becomes the best at everything (hello Warrior).

I want jobs to have meaning when playing, frankly they are doing a really good job at killing anything that may require an iota of thought because it is apparently too difficult to NOT design the game exclusively around the lowest common denominator.

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Originally Posted by Straticus

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far.

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No the hell we aren’t. Anyone who cares about 14’s gameplay at all and has any perspective at all thinks jobs are unreasonably boring and oversimplified.

I'm a casual and even I think a lot of jobs are too simple and way too homogenized. Especially tanks and healers, but also dd's like SMN or MCH.

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Originally Posted by Mayhemmer

People are rightfully concerned that jobs will be further pruned of their complexity, as they have been gradually over the past few expansions. Another job pruned of complexity is another job people want reverted.

Job complexity and encounter complexity are not a binary choice. Why do people treat things in this game like they're binary choices...

You can have both job complexity and fight complexity. There's no justification for sacrificing one or both outside of that coveted "accessibility," and it doesn't take a deep dive to see how people tend to view that reason...

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There is a certain balance that needs to be struck between fight complexity and job complexity, make both too complex and barely anyone can complete the content.
Where our opinions probably start to deviate is where that balance should be.

I'm of the opinion that Stormblood struck a good balance. Most jobs were easy enough to get into but still had a lot of nuance to them if you wanted to really get into them and fight mechanics weren't a joke either.

But ever since Shadowbringers this has started to increasingly skew to one side. Jobs are almost on auto pilot and all the complexity nowadays comes from learning and then executing the mechanics dance, your actual gameplay outside of "where to move to resolve mechanic" is so utterly bland that it negatively affects all content that doesn't throw 10 different oneshot mechanics at you.

Well to be honest as someone who hasn't even finished ShB yet and has like 2-3 jobs levelled to 80 and like 5 unlocked in total, my opinion on job balance seems kind of not very important. I still find the game fun to play though. My only complaint I guess would be that WHM at and until 50 was not very fun from a damage rotation standpoint so I just put it down to get a dps class instead. I honestly don't know how many people are like me, but for me these issues people are talking about are not very relevant, mostly because I'm not at a point in the game yet when they would become apparent, and because I can just do lots of other stuff if I don't like something and that has been working well for the past ~1,5 years. So there you have it, one non-representative opinion/experience to contrast with your own.

In a game where you can change your job whenever you want, balance shouldn't matter. Players who like to play jobs that do the most damage can play whichever job does the most damage that expansion.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I want to say that communication and good faith from Y-P are needed for that to be possible.

Communication on the feedback they got and consulting the whole community instead of just listening to a few voices would have been possible. Instead they made these change without players ever knowing, dropped them with an expansion and told us it was too late to change anything.

The "Vocal minority" increased manifold since ShB design changes. some pro-changes, most against it.
These voices were lost into the void and not acknowledged for years, only to be dismissed without any compromise.

Now lately Y-P stated that they had requests to make theses changes, and that WE players must reach a consensus.
That seems like a cheap excuse for poor choices and avoiding fixing the issue. The game has a "huge" player-base, getting everyone to agree is impossible, and worse, the "silent majority argument" get misused to dismiss any change...

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Originally Posted by Straticus

The jobs are mostly fine. People who want more complexity are in the minority by far. The vast majority of the playerbase is "casual". There's nothing wrong with that. If you want complexity then go find it in difficult fight mechanics. Job rotations should stay relatively simple because they're what everyone has to use. Some jobs can be harder than others of course, but rotations shouldn't be too complicated. Black mage is a great example of this. It's one of the hardest jobs to play, but the rotation itself isn't hard at all. It's about adapting to the fights.

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If jobs were fine, why do we have so many threads?
If roles were fine, why is it possible to clear ultimate without healers?
If healers were fine, why do people leave feedback for over 2 expansions?
If Machinist, Summoner, DRK, etc were fine, why do they feel incomplete?

Some actions and abilities do not work together, some do not make even any sense. Why do we have Flamethrower if it does nothing to the gauge? Why do we cast our summons back to back, but it still feels very monotonous? Why is DRK so restricted with it's MP management and abilities, wherein other tanks can use their skills anytime on cooldown.

A fight has literally no meaning, if the jobs are clunky as hell.

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Originally Posted by Calysto

Now lately Y-P stated that they had requests to make theses changes, and that WE players must reach a consensus.

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that's not what he is saying he was trying to prove a point and point being any changes will roughly a equal amount of like and dislike so constantly switching between this or that does nothing but change who is happy and who is mad making the changes in general rather pointless.

the biggest question always is, is this actually a issue for the playerbase or is it a problem for you?

players should always leave feedback cause it will show if just a small amount think something is wrong or a larger amount of the playerbase.

To be clear from the top, I have not read every reply, so take my response or leave it, but I find the criticism and call for more class complexity funny; and to be absolutely clear I agree with you. I am in favor of complexity. There are like 10 hotbars and I only use like 6. There is room to add complexity, but its funny because part of the reason they Homogenized (Not the whole reason no) was player complaints that it was too complicated.

As an example, I mained SMN until EW (Been playing for 9-10 yrs for context) and one of the chief complaints was that it was too complex with its "2 min. rotation (It wasn't that bad imo) - and YoshiP hates pet classes lol - but and so, over time it was simplified. Now here we go in the opposite direction saying they aren't complex enough.

I reiterate, I agree I would like more complexity personally. Actually I think both. There should be complex classes for those of us that like that, and simple ones for sprouts and those that like the simplicity

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Originally Posted by Landon_Targaryen

I am in favor of complexity. There are like 10 hotbars and I only use like 6.

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You use 6 hotbars for combat skills? That's hard to believe.

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Originally Posted by Calysto

Communication on the feedback they got and consulting the whole community instead of just listening to a few voices would have been possible. Instead they made these change without players ever knowing, dropped them with an expansion and told us it was too late to change anything.

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Not to doom-post, but this got to me during the NA and EU fanfests. Just the typical fanfests with zero mention of any kind of shakeups or change to fundamentals I'd expect to see in a game going on it's fifth expansion... I don't like it. I'm worried it's going to just be the status quo again. Afraid of seeing zero iteration by the end of launch content. Before somebody copy/pastes the "maybe you're just over the game" thing, I love this game. I want MORE of this game, but I'm afraid that going into Dawntrail is going to be a repeat of ShB going into EW...

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

There is a certain balance that needs to be struck between fight complexity and job complexity, make both too complex and barely anyone can complete the content.
Where our opinions probably start to deviate is where that balance should be.

I'm of the opinion that Stormblood struck a good balance. Most jobs were easy enough to get into but still had a lot of nuance to them if you wanted to really get into them and fight mechanics weren't a joke either.

But ever since Shadowbringers this has started to increasingly skew to one side. Jobs are almost on auto pilot and all the complexity nowadays comes from learning and then executing the mechanics dance, your actual gameplay outside of "where to move to resolve mechanic" is so utterly bland that it negatively affects all content that doesn't throw 10 different oneshot mechanics at you.

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I agree. The problem with that approach is that only current content is engaging while the rest gets nerfed into oblivion by ilvl cheese and ability removals. It is not okay that you have ARR, HW, SbH, ShB and soon EW where you don't even need to open your eyes to complete content unless you go min ilvl (sometimes). Complexity should come from the jobs first because they are always present.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

You use 6 hotbars for combat skills? That's hard to believe.

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No Combat only uses 2-2.5. 1 is potions buffs etc. 1 is mounts and Social stuff, Emotes. Gpose etc. 1 is Macros. So 5, but my point being I use 5 total. There's room for more skills that allow for increased complexity in classes. I've never seen anyone using all 10

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Originally Posted by Landon_Targaryen

No Combat only uses 2-2.5. 1 is potions buffs etc. 1 is mounts and Social stuff, Emotes. Gpose etc. 1 is Macros. So 5, but my point being I use 5 total. There's room for more skills that allow for increased complexity in classes. I've never seen anyone using all 10

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If you're defining using the hotbars like that then I use all 10 and could actually use more hotbar space. I have a lot of macros for turning various hotbars/UI elements into toggle features. Having more space for that kind of set up, notably for job stones and glamour macros would be very helpful.

I use to be excited for new skills every expansion. However this time I am entering Dawntrail not excited for new skills but worried for what will be removed.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Balance was statistically better, thats why it was fished for. Not because world first raiders told them to. Also, the reason why Bard wanted crit back then was because its skills procced off of crit hits. That is gone, so that wouldn't be as effective now. We need less crit mechanics anyway, because crit is still too strong.


And the cards are 3% on the wrong jobs and 6% on the correct ones. I wasn't talking about astrodyne.


Old balance was 5% party spread or 10% on one person. That's why it was fished for.

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I didn't say the cards were a 5% buff, I said Astrodyne was, and I also said it was disappointing, the cards are only relevant to world first savage clears and outside of that content hardly have any real impact and you might as well just not bother with them if not for the MP gain on them.

OP: Saw that as well. Might edit to put the link into the OP? Then again, people will probably badmouth you for it...hard to say with this crowd.

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For my part, I enjoy the game as it is right now for the most part. I REALLY miss there being a Bozja/Eureka to work on when there's a lot of downtime, though. Would really love to have one of those again. Stuff like Island Sanctuary doesn't work well for that since you can't really work on it - you mostly let the Mamets do everything, and doing things yourself (a) is less efficient, (b) you can't even get all the stuff from gathering (the rare mats), and (c) you don't even have the option to craft the handicrafts yourself. Deep Dungeon doesn't quite scratch that itch because you can't pop in, work as little as 5 mins or as much as 3 hours, and pop out again. If you leave a few minutes into a party, you're screwing the other 3 people, and if you leave or DC in the middle of a solo run, you forfeit that ENTIRE run.

I like an "all of the above" approach. I get it takes more Dev resources, but surely FFXIV has a larger team with how successful it is now AND a lot of systems are in place now to make developing content quicker (e.g. any new Deep Dungeon should be far faster to develop than the original PotD was). Having lots of different stuff means lots of different types of players are happy.

I also think this should extend to Job design. Some people WANT things as convoluted and Frankenstein monster as old SMN was. Some people love Jobs they don't have to read out of game guides for but can just work out in game, like new SMN. It's good for each role to have at least one simple and one complex option, with a spread in between for players to find what they like best. IDEALLY, these match the Job fantasy as well (e.g. WAR being kind of unga bunga makes sense). Likewise, you have some players within roles that want different things, so it pays to have a spread there as well. BRD, DNC, SMN, and RDM all appeal to players who like to DPS (or are DPSing for friends when all the Tank/Healer spots are full) with a more support feel. Some people want Healers that are basically damage dealers while others play Healers because they want to HEAL and have DPS Jobs if they actually feel like DPSing. So have a healer that entirely heals by dealing damage (call it Sage, perhaps) and one that has few damage buttons and is mostly about throughput healing. Have the others be kind of in between in various ways. We have 4 healer Jobs, after all. In fact, no role has less than 3 Jobs in it at this point.

The important thing is to give people options. Then people will gravitate to the things they like best. I think how we got into this mess was trying to simultaneously please everyone WITH EVERY THING, which just isn't possible. It results in the Devs doing something because they were asked, but that alienates a different set of people who then ask for it to be changed back, while another group that was content with the first way but didn't really like it is now speaking up saying they want it changed in yet ANOTHER way.

Better to offer a lot of different stuff and let players pick from there.

These things can still be balanced decently - that's just potency bumps here and there - but balance shouldn't be an argument for blandness.

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Oh, and speaking as a non-raider (RARELY do Savage fights, and haven't enjoyed Extremes this expansion due to all the Savage mechanics and body checks): Can we PLEASE have the actual content (non-Savage stuff) come out in the X.Y patch? Like 6.4 came out and I had nothing to do other than run the normal mode raids once per week (due to lockouts) and that was it. All the ACTUAL content I enjoy and do - Relics, Tribal quests, etc - was 2 months later. Meaning I got almost nothing out of the patch for 2 months. I'm not saying bump the Savage to the X.Y5s (though that would technically make more sense as Savage raiders tend to do the other stuff, too), but can we have the GOOD, ACTUAL content that more people do (Savages are done by a small portion of the playerbase overall, around 1/4th to 1/3rd) come out AT LEAST with the Savages? This is that "all of the above stuff". The way it is now, everyone who isn't a Savage raider is treated as a second class citizen.

"But the Savage raiders will feel overworked!" (a) no one's making them do it, (b) if it's so bad, we can bump the Savage fights to X.Y5 to make them happy. I suspect they'd rather NOT that latter option.

Oh, and that other thing:

Stop having constant body checks in Extreme fights and stop putting Savage mechanics there. That's what we do Extremes instead of Savages to AVOID. GolbEx was the worst at this. Depending on how you count, there's something like 7 body checks in that fight, and some are back to back, meaning if someone dies to any of them in the chain, guaranteed wipe. ZeromusEx was a WAY better and more fun fight. More like that, please.

It's bad enough there's no difficulty between normal and Extreme, we don't need to turn Extremes into Savage as well making that gulf even wider and removing some of the little midcore content the game has!

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Originally Posted by Connor

What worries me is that there’s never any definitive way to prove that the silent majority isn’t the one saying ‘everything in FFXIV is fine’. I don’t think that’s the case, but how would we ever know lol

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I think the problem is, no one understands the "day crowd/night crowd" effect.

People used to ask a theological question "In the Bible, everyone seems to love Jesus and think he's a great teacher, yet all of a sudden, they all are asking for his death even if it means freeing a murderer/-apist. How does this make sense?" And the counter-argument used to explain this was "Two different groups of people. The 'day crowd' followed him by day and liked his teachings, but the 'night crowd' was made up of the religious/etc leaders of the day that feared him and goaded their followers into demanding his death."

Basically, there are different groups of people. The problem is assuming there are not. "People asked for the 2 min meta/no Bozja or Eureka/homogenization/balance/etc and are now upset when they get it?" No, it's different groups of people. This is the first thing that must be understood.

The second thing is this: In a parliamentary system of government, where there are more than two parties, often NO PARTY is the majority. Take the UK. Labour and Tories are the two main parties, and always the dominant party when the left/right (respectively) come to power in their coalitions, but they HAVE to form coalition governments with like-politic/ideology parties. For example, Labour may coalition with the Greens and Democratic-Socialists. Why? Because it's EXTREMELY rare for either Labour OR Tories to get an outright majority (>50%) such that they don't have to join with others.

How's this relevant?

There may well be NO majority. It may be a bunch of minority groups. Some may have similar goals (able to coalition with each other easily enough) while still having differences of opinion or exact ideal they seek. There may be no majority at all, just a lot of silent minorities and a vocal (rotating as changes are made) minority group(s).

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Originally Posted by Ardeth

I feel like Feanor with the Silmarils, lol. I've rewritten this a dozen times and can't recreate the sentiment that got me here.

But to me, what I look for in classes is simple systems that I can understand quickly. I find some classes have button bloat, but honestly, if a job works and there isn't a community uproar, why change it? I think by that metric, a job like Red Mage or Summoner is more up my alley. Something that, while easy and simple, allows me more freedom to do harder things.

So, for me, at least something being simple is a lot better than the alternative in almost every case. In life and in video games.

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I'm with this.

More complex/harder Jobs exist. They are among the least played (BLM, MNK, DRK, etc). That doesn't mean we shouldn't have them (the people that DO play them obviously prefer them), but it's why we need other Jobs to NOT be that. For all the flack it gets, SMN is probably the only DPS Job in the game right now you can play more or less optimally without going to any third party website, Discord, reading guides, etc. You can just put it together from how the abilities work. Some of the tooltips are a bit convoluted, but it sets up the basic pattern early, and by level 90, it's easy to understand "use big summon, use its abilities, use little summons and their abilities, use Ruin 3 if you have time with nothing better up before the big summon is ready again, repeat", with the only nuance being that you ideally want to use Energy Drain every minute, but save the Festers for every 2nd minute when you use Searing Light.

But the point is, while never going outside of the game, players can more or less figure out how to play it more or less optimally just using the tooltips and playing it based on how things fit together. You do need to understand burst (but only in the "use Searing Light then all your big hits/long CD stuff and don't use Ruin 4 during your big Summons" way), and you do need to understand oGCD weaving (but this is true of every Job). But as far as rotation and opener, it's not convoluted and is straightforward enough MOST anyone can figure it out.

Contrasting that, you get stuff like MNK, BLM, high end SAM, etc that have a lot of very nuanced and sometimes counterintuitive things they need to do in order to be played optimally, and in some of those cases, not playing optimally leads to huge gaps between you and someone who is.

Again, some people love that - "all of the above" is my approach - so we should have some of those. But we should also have some of the others. And some of the in-betweens.

I like that WAR, WHM, and SMN are all straightforward Jobs, and there's one for each role. Arguably DNC as well (Melee doesn't really have one). It do think it a bit odd that SCH and SMN are such a disconnect (seems RDM should have been the non-complex one or SCH the non-complex healer), but whatever. Close enough for now, and SCH is still pretty approachable if you let it be.

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Not every Job needs to be terribly complicated, and having some - dare I say one of each role - that isn't complex/is straightforward is good game design. "all of the above".

The job topic itself aside, which group is supposed to be the minority and the majority?

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

No the hell we aren’t. Anyone who cares about 14’s gameplay at all and has any perspective at all thinks jobs are unreasonably boring and oversimplified.

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I'm not sure how far - or not - in the minority you are, but plenty of people care about 14's gameplay "at all" have have perspective "at all" and do like some or most Jobs as they are now.

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Originally Posted by xbahax92

If jobs were fine, why do we have so many threads?
If roles were fine, why is it possible to clear ultimate without healers?
If healers were fine, why do people leave feedback for over 2 expansions?
If Machinist, Summoner, DRK, etc were fine, why do they feel incomplete?

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1) Because the vocal minority is VERY vocal.
2) Exactly ONE ultimate has had this done at level/current content, done by an extremely skilled set of players cheesing mechanics. One could argue it's not the roles but being able to wait to accept raises that was the issue.
3) See (1)
4) They don't "feel incomplete" to everyone, they do to you. That's a subjective position, not a statement of fact.

On (4) specifically, this is where you are going to get the most divergence between players. Whenever you use the word "feel", you're talking about something specific to you. While some others may feel the same way, still other people may not feel that way at all. It's like taste in music or art etc. For example, SMN's Summons don't feel monotonous to me at all. Each one has a nice dopamine hit that I enjoy a lot. I'm not saying my position is universal, but I am saying yours is not, either. And your DRK statement there is literally you arguing for homogenization/boredom - if DRK DIDN'T have MP management and DID work like the other tanks "use their skills anytime on cooldown", that would be the dreaded homogenization demon rearing its head, would it not?

The only way to know (1) and (3) would be to see what the entire playerbase thinks. (4) is subjective and thus there's no way to prove either way. (2) is an extremely niche situation in extremely niche content that has no bearing on much of the game and was done by extremely niche/skilled players using a very specific niche strategy (Cover + Invulns + cheesing waiting to accept raises + RDM mass raising potential) and still running dozens or even hundreds of times until the RNG gods lined up for them just right. The fact people use that zero healer TOP clear as evidence of ANYthing is honestly absurd. Much less using it as some indictment on the entire game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Renathras

snip

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to add to this, another common fallacy I see in many of these arguments, across pretty much every online community, is, "everyone I talk to feels the same way", not realizing that through the social groups they chose to take part in, they are creating an echo chamber of people with the same goals, views and grievances as they do. So of course they'll hear the same issues and complaints brought up over and over again, and feel like "everyone" is talking about it and feeling the same way. Meanwhile the other 99% of the player base not in those circles are talking about their own things, enjoying different content, setting different goals, and having different grievances in their own 1% circles.

You know, the developers have access to the raw data who plays their game, for how long and how they play it, and what are the cut off points for disengagement.

You hire couple of analysts and boom, you got an idea what the silent majority looks like. Game developers don't have too guess. Behaviour is not silent.

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Originally Posted by Ayche

You know, the developers have access to the raw data who plays their game, for how long and how they play it, and what are the cut off points for disengagement.

You hire couple of analysts and boom, you got an idea what the silent majority looks like. Game developers don't have too guess. Behaviour is not silent.

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Yes and no. The issue is looking at that data doesn't account for nuances and context. Such as how many people are doing something simply due to necessity? Or in the case of the Manderville weapons. Sure more weapons are being created. However how many players are simply creating and upgrading the weapons as a means to just dump tomes accumulated doing their weekly's?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

Yes and no. The issue is looking at that data doesn't account for nuances and context. Such as how many people are doing something simply due to necessity? Or in the case of the Manderville weapons. Sure more weapons are being created. However how many players are simply creating and upgrading the weapons as a means to just dump tomes accumulated doing their weekly's?

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If you mean by that the popularity could be inflated by such means for example, that is a trivial thing to filter on a data set.

Like you can filter based on just first relic created per player. They even operate by different quests. Data analysis is always educated guessing, but it is not controversial conclusion to draw that popular things tend to serve a purpose.

People say only the minority comes here (which is true I think) and yet this is still a feedback forum. This talk about numbers and validity is arbitrary at best. Let SE hear your feedback and move on.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I'm not sure how far - or not - in the minority you are, but plenty of people care about 14's gameplay "at all" have have perspective "at all" and do like some or most Jobs as they are now.



1) Because the vocal minority is VERY vocal.
2) Exactly ONE ultimate has had this done at level/current content, done by an extremely skilled set of players cheesing mechanics. One could argue it's not the roles but being able to wait to accept raises that was the issue.
3) See (1)
4) They don't "feel incomplete" to everyone, they do to you. That's a subjective position, not a statement of fact.

On (4) specifically, this is where you are going to get the most divergence between players. Whenever you use the word "feel", you're talking about something specific to you. While some others may feel the same way, still other people may not feel that way at all. It's like taste in music or art etc. For example, SMN's Summons don't feel monotonous to me at all. Each one has a nice dopamine hit that I enjoy a lot. I'm not saying my position is universal, but I am saying yours is not, either. And your DRK statement there is literally you arguing for homogenization/boredom - if DRK DIDN'T have MP management and DID work like the other tanks "use their skills anytime on cooldown", that would be the dreaded homogenization demon rearing its head, would it not?

The only way to know (1) and (3) would be to see what the entire playerbase thinks. (4) is subjective and thus there's no way to prove either way. (2) is an extremely niche situation in extremely niche content that has no bearing on much of the game and was done by extremely niche/skilled players using a very specific niche strategy (Cover + Invulns + cheesing waiting to accept raises + RDM mass raising potential) and still running dozens or even hundreds of times until the RNG gods lined up for them just right. The fact people use that zero healer TOP clear as evidence of ANYthing is honestly absurd. Much less using it as some indictment on the entire game.

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I can easily finish dungeon runs without a healer. Does that make me niche now? A tank is all you need to survive boss mechanics, hell there are situations where the healer dies early and you can still finish the boss.
And not to forget, everything is subjective. Even your opinion. Are you the majority?

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Originally Posted by xbahax92

I can easily finish dungeon runs without a healer. Does that make me niche now? A tank is all you need to survive boss mechanics, hell there are situations where the healer dies early and you can still finish the boss.
And not to forget, everything is subjective. Even your opinion. Are you the majority?

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"If roles were fine, why is it possible to clear ultimate without healers?"

I was unaware that dungeon runs were ultimates.

EDIT:

Also, I've never claimed to be a majority. I just claim to be a number greater than 0.
...unlike some people with some views...

They will keep running issues with Jobs as they make more of them. Not to mention the existing trouble within sub classes, where BLM and MCH are outliers in their role and will continue to be painful to keep in line with rest one way or another.