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.