If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

Yeah, I don't think it was designed around that. Rather, it's an expectation that's taken root in the modern MMO community for some reason. I get that a lot of healers are complaining that they have nothing to do, but these same people are likely raiding high end content with static groups of very competent players. Naturally, you're not going to have to heal very much in those scenarios. If you want to spend your time healing as a healer, then you need to run with random sprouts who constantly stand in stuff and collect vuln stacks. I can tell you that this makes for a much more engaging healing experience that doesn't even treat DPS as anything but filler. That's what the game is really designed around, but the high end community doesn't like to hear that. They want to run with the best of the best and then complain that the best of the best are too easily healed.

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It may not have been ORIGINALLY designed around that. But it IS balanced around the asusmption of that.

Enrage timers are balanced around healer dps. Try clearing any extreme trial or savage on launch with two 0 dps healers and tell me again that content is not CURRENTLY designed around healers dpsing.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

It may not have been ORIGINALLY designed around that. But it IS balanced around the asusmption of that.

Enrage timers are balanced around healer dps. Try clearing any extreme trial or savage on launch with two 0 dps healers and tell me again that content is not CURRENTLY designed around healers dpsing.

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I've been there and done that. Failed enrage timers are generally caused by low dps output to begin with being paired with DPS players also dying to mechanics making that low output even lower. Having healers DPS just provides a small amount of wiggle room for the DPS to players to be lackluster provided the healer isn't ignoring healing duties to focus on their dps parse. Something that would happen far more often if they added more to healer job dps kits. This I feel is caused by NA culture trying to turn as many things as possible into a speed run.

As the guy you replied to said. One of the issue's I see frequently is healers only wanting to play with pro level players because randoms are too much work when they eat mechanics and need additional heals then when they get their party of pro players who only take damage from unavoidable roomwide AoE's they complain about being bored because they're only using 2-3 spells.

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Originally Posted by Thorio

I don't get this, people want to have more damage skills when your focus is healing? Then playing anything but healer should be better imo.

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I played SCH from ARR to mid StB. Back then, SCH actually had multiple dps buttons to use and keep track of. I found it enjoyable. The reasoning I stopped, was specifically with Stormblood, I had this weird feeling in the back of my mind. This was the expac that cleric stance died, and the reasoning was to make healers have an easier time dpsing. I didn't mind this, it barely effected me personally as I never got stuck in cleric stance. However, something just didn't feel right to me by the middleground, and I ended up dropping the job in favor of BLM.

Queue the next expansion, we have removed basically every single offensive spell from SCH because... it was to make healers have an easier time dpsing.

That. Was the red flag. I just didn't see it at the very start.

So, yes. I am playing anything but healer. I specifically even moved my SCH jobstone to my retainer, to prevent myself from ever, EVER getting ideas. In square's efforts to make healers more accessible, they drove me away from playing it. And as they continue to do this to more and more jobs, I slowly and surely want to play them less and less. I'm at the point where I'm terrified on my BLM, every single time there's an update. "They're gonna ruin it." "It's coming up." "They're gonna take the fun out of my job again." These should never be thoughts of any player when patches are coming. These are meant to be exciting, not fearful.

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Originally Posted by Ronduwil

Yeah, I don't think it was designed around that. Rather, it's an expectation that's taken root in the modern MMO community for some reason. I get that a lot of healers are complaining that they have nothing to do, but these same people are likely raiding high end content with static groups of very competent players. Naturally, you're not going to have to heal very much in those scenarios. If you want to spend your time healing as a healer, then you need to run with random sprouts who constantly stand in stuff and collect vuln stacks. I can tell you that this makes for a much more engaging healing experience that doesn't even treat DPS as anything but filler. That's what the game is really designed around, but the high end community doesn't like to hear that. They want to run with the best of the best and then complain that the best of the best are too easily healed.

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Even when you do content with a party full of people who have no idea what they’re doing, you are still primarily DPSing as a healer. There simply isn’t that much to heal, and most mechanics in non-Savage content are so non-threatening that you can eat them with multiple vulnerability stacks and it’s a toss up if they will actually hurt you. The most “DPS downtime” you’ll have is Day 1 of a new 24-man—and that’s only because you’ll be spending 8 seconds hard casting Raises the way Oprah hands out free stuff if the raid is well-designed (not looking at you, Void Ark). That’s the only time I actually feel engaged as a healer, and that’s been the case since late HW—before I ever started raiding.

The high-end only want “the best of the best” in very specific situations, such as barse runs or speeds where they already have a high goal in mind (e.g., oranges/pinks, fast kills). You’re completely missing the point of the complaints, which lie primarily in that healers are the only role that get more boring the more competent their party is. To the point that, in some fights, a second isn’t even needed. In a handful, they can be done without a healer at all.

This game does take healer DPS into account, and it has for several years now. Healers are basically support—and they do enough personal damage that, if you aren’t contributing to damage, you are griefing your party. There simply isn’t enough downtime to warrant healer DPS to not be considered meaningful.

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

I've been there and done that. Failed enrage timers are generally caused by low dps output to begin with being paired with DPS players also dying to mechanics making that low output even lower. Having healers DPS just provides a small amount of wiggle room for the DPS to players to be lackluster provided the healer isn't ignoring healing duties to focus on their dps parse. Something that would happen far more often if they added more to healer job dps kits. This I feel is caused by NA culture trying to turn as many things as possible into a speed run.

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I don’t think you realize that two good healers already do more damage than the highest parsing DPS job right now. You’re severely underestimating the impact of healer DPS. As I said above, it is straight-up griefing if you are a healer and refuse to DPS. Healers simply do too much damage.

I also fail to see how giving healers more DPS options would prompt them to heal less. You do realize that healers hardly have much to heal right now as it is, right? Aside from the fact that they blow their oGCD resources first, which can be just as easily done doing a 1-2-3 or managing multiple DoTs as it can be spamming Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis now.

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As the guy you replied to said. One of the issue's I see frequently is healers only wanting to play with pro level players because randoms are too much work when they eat mechanics and need additional heals then when they get their party of pro players who only take damage from unavoidable roomwide AoE's they complain about being bored because they're only using 2-3 spells.

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Healers only tend to get annoyed by DPS eating stuff when they are constantly having to pick them off of the floor because the DPS don’t greed responsibly. When I have to waste my 2400 MP on raising them 5 times during a single encounter, it’s irksome. I’m a lot more lenient in new content and when people are learning—but when it’s obvious that the DPS is being carried, then I start to get annoyed. But I also just dislike carrying in general. Regardless of the role I’m on.

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

I've been there and done that. Failed enrage timers are generally caused by low dps output to begin with being paired with DPS players also dying to mechanics making that low output even lower. Having healers DPS just provides a small amount of wiggle room for the DPS to players to be lackluster provided the healer isn't ignoring healing duties to focus on their dps parse. Something that would happen far more often if they added more to healer job dps kits. This I feel is caused by NA culture trying to turn as many things as possible into a speed run.

As the guy you replied to said. One of the issue's I see frequently is healers only wanting to play with pro level players because randoms are too much work when they eat mechanics and need additional heals then when they get their party of pro players who only take damage from unavoidable roomwide AoE's they complain about being bored because they're only using 2-3 spells.

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This. I see people complaining all they do is spam Stone and I think "Do you queue with randoms? Because it doesn't sound like you do". Or if they do they deliberately don't heal because people were people and picked up a vuln or took some damage or whatever. Pear-shaped groups are my favorite. They keep me so busy. They challenge my ability to be the glue that holds things together and I get to be a Big Damned Hero when I pull it off.

I do think those smoother DF groups are boring and would like more to do, though not dps. I'd rather get support abilities like buffs or debuffs or damage shields to maintain. It means I'd be even busier in pear-shaped groups but that's fine with me. Give me those plates to balance. I'm up to the challenge.

The healer downtime argument isn't even worth engaging with. It's plainly silly. Without healer DPS every decently challenging raid would be impossible to finish at minimum ilvl.

But RE: the topic at hand. I like a simpler FFXIV. The kaiten removal was only bad because it makes the job feel less impressive. They can fix that without making people's APM higher.

FFXIV is only going to get simpler and that's a good thing to most people.

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Originally Posted by Snowborn

But RE: the topic at hand. I like a simpler FFXIV. The kaiten removal was only bad because it makes the job feel less impressive. [/b]They can fix that without making people's APM higher.[/b]

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A higher APM would be seen as “too busy” by this community—thereby going against your “simpler FFXIV” design wishes.

I'm always trying to understand why people want these jobs to be simplified. Sometimes it's the developers themselves.

People argue too much. We have millions of players and you can't realistically make things too complicated, but this route they're taking is.. unfortunate to say the least.

Hissatsu: Kaiten didn't need to be removed. In all my time of playing (approaching 7000 hours) no one ever complained about it. It reminds me alot of my favourite job DRK. Same treatment.

Speak up if you can. The DRK community got their fixes after 7 years. You guys have to work together instead of argue. We can't all be happy but there will be some agreement from everyone if you try.

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Originally Posted by Thorio

I don't get this, people want to have more damage skills when your focus is healing? Then playing anything but healer should be better imo.

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In FF14, every role is DPS!

Yoshi was speaking facts.

The up-rise of FFXIV, is directly correlated to the fall of WoW.

He may know, like WoW, being on top does not last forever.

WoW lost players because it is a near 20 year old mmo. I am shocked WoW lasted that long on top to be honest....People were saying WoW was too easy back in 2010. I don't think it lost players due to that; just my opinion.

XIV's decline will come eventually, and he may be aware of that. If it happened to WoW, it can happen to any mmo. WoW is the most dominant mmo ever. SE could be working on another mmo for all we know.

XI shifted focus on Trust the same year their final expansion released.

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Originally Posted by MonsutaMan

Yoshi was speaking facts.

The up-rise of FFXIV, is directly correlated to the fall of WoW.

He may know, like WoW, being on top does not last forever.

WoW lost players because it is a near 20 year old mmo. I am shocked WoW lasted that long on top to be honest....People were saying WoW was too easy back in 2010. I don't think it lost players due to that; just my opinion.

XIV's decline will come eventually, and he may be aware of that. If it happened to WoW, it can happen to any mmo. WoW is the most dominant mmo ever. SE could be working on another mmo for all we know.

XI shifted focus on Trust the same year their final expansion released.

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No, WoW lost players because of terrible design choices spanning at least a decade. The continued interest despite all of that is a huge indicator that age isn't a factor. I would know. I was and continue to be there (sometimes).

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Originally Posted by MonsutaMan

Yoshi was speaking facts.

The up-rise of FFXIV, is directly correlated to the fall of WoW.

He may know, like WoW, being on top does not last forever.

WoW lost players because it is a near 20 year old mmo. I am shocked WoW lasted that long on top to be honest....People were saying WoW was too easy back in 2010. I don't think it lost players due to that; just my opinion.

XIV's decline will come eventually, and he may be aware of that. If it happened to WoW, it can happen to any mmo. WoW is the most dominant mmo ever. SE could be working on another mmo for all we know.

XI shifted focus on Trust the same year their final expansion released.

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WoW didnt lost most of its players because 'too easy'
The biggest factor is the constant focus on repetitious tasks that players need to do daily/weekly to keep up.
WoW often felt like a chore, and then transitioned this into borrowed power systems
Had this been account wide then *maybe* people wouldnt have found it so bad. but you needed to do it on alts too. In a game that was even more heavy handed than FFXIV is lately with its balance changes.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

<snip>
This game does take healer DPS into account, and it has for several years now. Healers are basically support—and they do enough personal damage that, if you aren’t contributing to damage, you are griefing your party. There simply isn’t enough downtime to warrant healer DPS to not be considered meaningful.

I don’t think you realize that two good healers already do more damage than the highest parsing DPS job right now. You’re severely underestimating the impact of healer DPS. As I said above, it is straight-up griefing if you are a healer and refuse to DPS. Healers simply do too much damage.

I also fail to see how giving healers more DPS options would prompt them to heal less. You do realize that healers hardly have much to heal right now as it is, right? Aside from the fact that they blow their oGCD resources first, which can be just as easily done doing a 1-2-3 or managing multiple DoTs as it can be spamming Glare/Malefic/Broil/Dosis now.



Healers only tend to get annoyed by DPS eating stuff when they are constantly having to pick them off of the floor because the DPS don’t greed responsibly. When I have to waste my 2400 MP on raising them 5 times during a single encounter, it’s irksome. I’m a lot more lenient in new content and when people are learning—but when it’s obvious that the DPS is being carried, then I start to get annoyed. But I also just dislike carrying in general. Regardless of the role I’m on.

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My honest ideal would be to intertwine healing and dpsing together. And I don't mean like sage... a very basic example is how lilies work. By healing, I get to do damage. Great. Now that lilies are damage neutrla, I'm encouraged to find reasons to use those heals. That's a smart design. And I'd love if the opposite was true. Give me like a 'petal' bar that increases every time I do damage and when it fills up I can cast a high damage nuke spell that makes my next lily off the global cooldown. Or give me a proc on dealing damage that makes my next single target healing spell also apply regen.

Make doing damage and healing part of the same kit and intertwined in interesting ways. Reward me for dpsing with healing... and reward me for healing with dps. THAT would be my absolute ideal. (but at the same time, I do enjoy what I'm doing now because the fight design is really good so *shrugs*)

Job changes don't bother me really, it is what it is.

But my main issue with FFXIV is the dumbed down Normal Content which to me seems to have been a problem for many years.

I finally put my finger on what I found really wrong with this game and its the fact that most Overworld monsters, Dungeon monsters (including some bosses, not all of them), and other misc. content involving battles are simply not that engaging and very dull. Either this was by design or something else I don't know, but while I understand a lot of people play this game from a business standpoint but aren't we here to stimulate our senses and not dull it out trying to have fun or FIND FUN? I can understand wanting a easy time, but what is the point of a game if everything is hand given with just a swipe 1-2-3.

I'm not even sure if Normal Content should be called Normal, feels like very easy mode from 2.0 to now.

I was really disappointed even the final boss of a long chapter turned out to be a pushover like everything else, but then I'm reminded that past FF games did this too..but I was hoping a MMORPG wouldn't take this route. It doesn't leave much satisfaction at all.

I was given a bit of hope with the new alliance raid, the bosses are actually reasonable in terms of being a challenge but I wish this was more consistent everywhere else.

EDIT -

My final point, but what in the world did Final Fantasy XI do to cause Final Fantasy XIV to be complete almost opposite of engagement? Its really odd that FFXI was reasonable in almost everything it did (except for a very specific post game boss that was pure insanity) but Final Fantasy XIV not so much. You would think its best to know what worked, and why that game was fun and carry that onward.

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Originally Posted by Imoye

Yoshi P said in a video that FFXIV wouldn't exist were it not for WoW. The game was a major inspirational source for this game. My question really is: Is the dev team willing to learn from the mistakes Blizzard made?

Blizzard literally went on a raging simplification spree. Notably pruning and removing tons of abilities from each class and specializations in the name of "accessibility". Shortly after the game went downhill big time. Skill expression is today completely gone in WoW. Every class plays braindead 1-2-3 button smashing that literally dulls your brain as you play.

I truly do not understand why the developers want to do the same thing to FFXIV. Heck, Blizzard even recently stated that pruning was a mistake. They're now trying to "undo" the damage, but that's likely going to take multiple expansions of work. Why on earth would you want to repeat this same mistake in FFXIV?

Having easy jobs is perfectly fine, but there needs to be jobs that offer also medium difficulty and high difficulty. Pruning and dumbing down existing jobs is not in any way acceptable, and is an insult to players who main those jobs. If you want to make something simple, then you need to create new jobs that are simple from the beginning - period. People are invested in their jobs and you're actively disrespecting their affection by making changes none of them asked for.

By all means, continue to remove abilities and make the game play itself. You will not gain more subs; but you will lose half your player base from your arrogance.

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Exactly. Just because someone is casual doesn't mean they don't enjoy complexity and nuance.

The hype over Ultimate shows that a significant portion of this playerbase cares about skill and display of skill. Having a high skill ceiling isn't something to be afraid of; it just serves as something for players to want to attain in the long term.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

The hype over Ultimate shows that a significant portion of this playerbase cares about skill and display of skill. Having a high skill ceiling isn't something to be afraid of; it just serves as something for players to want to attain in the long term.

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I'm gonna disagree there. Lots of people are watching it for the spectacle and the memes, but would never want to do it themselves. Much like many people who watch sports. They can appreciate the work that goes into it and the dedication while deciding that that route isn't for them.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

I'm gonna disagree there. Lots of people are watching it for the spectacle and the memes, but would never want to do it themselves. Much like many people who watch sports. They can appreciate the work that goes into it and the dedication while deciding that that route isn't for them.

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At the same time lots of people are trying out Extreme or first floor Savage for the first time because of this hype and buzz.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

At the same time lots of people are trying out Extreme or first floor Savage for the first time because of this hype and buzz.

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Yeah but how many are going to stick with it when they see what's required? I'm sure some will, but others will be turned off by it and just go back to watching the spectacle.

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Originally Posted by Elesh

My honest ideal would be to intertwine healing and dpsing together.

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Well, i think that dps on its own on a healer generaly already does fine. Its usualy however that the moment a healer has to heal, its considered a negative thing, and overhealing on that considered even worse. The DPS focus is too excessive here. Giving heals compensation in dps to make their heals reduce the effective dps loss is a good way to negate that.

However, the other way around isnt. DPSing should not reward with even more healing, as that would amplify the issue and push the focus more to dps again, instad of pushing the focus to healing. If healing always has the same output. DPS is simply just its reward for efficient healing. If DPS becomes a key aspect for healing, then you essentialy are forced into dpsing more. Consistent healing however should be the key aspect. You want to push a focus towards keeping teammates at high health instead of just avoiding them to get killed at best.

oGCD heals are on that a safe thing as they dont disrupt the dps, and are effective. But also the most dull. So yes, intertwining is the best way to handle this.

But i think some DPS abilities should be tied towards the HP of teammates. If their HP is lower, your dps also will.

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Originally Posted by Imoye

Yes [having "500 abilities"] does ["make the game more fun"]. Abilities create depth and foster interest as well as satisfaction and mastery.

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Ability count, though, is not merely a matter of button count. Nor is it equal to a job's total ability depth.

Even using fewer buttons than present, we can have deeper and more compelling kits than we presently possess.




:: By no means does this advocate for the removal of abilities like Kaiten. I'll just note that adding random hit-on-CD, zero-synergy oGCDs doesn't add a lick of depth, either, nor was any actual depth lost in the consolidation of the already equally fail-proof Gnashing Fang combo; as such, depth (or, further still, engagement) cannot be simplified into a mere matter of button or action count.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Yeah but how many are going to stick with it when they see what's required? I'm sure some will, but others will be turned off by it and just go back to watching the spectacle.

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The fact that JP has a Savage clear rate of 40%+ means that actually, a majority of players are going to stick with it (it's going to be 50%+ for those who bother to do Extreme and above type of content).

On both JP and NA players have complained repeatedly about job homogenization and JP is often even more vocal about it.

The matter of fact is that increasing the skill ceiling does not hurt casual players in any way, because they wouldn't ever need to reach that skill ceiling to comfortably clear content in FF14. But decreasing the skill ceiling hurts skilled players.

I quit WoW because of their terrible borrowed power systems and gameplay mechanics made solely for playtime metrics, their company profile flipped me over the edge completely. Their class design had nothing to do with it heck their simplest class Demon Hunter was my main because it didnt had button bloat. And each button felt meaningfull towards my burst.

i guess i am just letting my brainpower fluctuate with the game, so i have just gotten stupider with the game, yay

٩(◍╹∀╹◍)۶

It's probably more like 1% of the player base who is against simplifying the game but they are the loudest and on these forums 24/7 so you think they are half the player base

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Originally Posted by Thorio

I don't get this, people want to have more damage skills when your focus is healing? Then playing anything but healer should be better imo.

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As a GNB, your job is to get hit by enemies and mitigate damage. Your only DPS skills should be Keen Edge for single target, Demon Slice for AoE and Bow Shock as an oGCD. Everything else should be aggro and mitigation skills. If you want more DPS buttons, playing a DPS would be better as tanking is your focus.

Would you like that?

We should get a calculator class like in Final Fantasy Tactics to which in order to get that super over 9000 potency attack you got to chain math combos. <3 kupo

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

DPSing should not reward with even more healing, as that would amplify the issue and push the focus more to dps again, instad of pushing the focus to healing.

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The focus is already mostly on DPS. What do you think a healer is doing for the 45-60 seconds where a dungeon boss is doing nothing but auto-attacks after a 'buster or raid-wide? What do you think a healer is doing for the 70-90% of most non-Savage fights where no healing is required? What do you think a healer is doing when running the MSQ, where no healing is ever required?

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

If DPS becomes a key aspect for healing,

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It already is.

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

then you essentialy are forced into dpsing more.

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You already are. Regardless of whatever YoshiderP may claim, fights at min iLvl are tuned to account for healer DPS.

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

Consistent healing however should be the key aspect. You want to push a focus towards keeping teammates at high health instead of just avoiding them to get killed at best.

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Why? You don't get more loot or a higher score if you clear with everybody at 100% health instead of 10%. Healing is pass/fail.

And in this game, every attack is scripted. If you know that there won't be any more incoming damage for the next 30 seconds, why bother frantically healing everybody up to full right now? Throw a Medica II/Aspected Helios/Whispering Wind on the party and let the regen tick them up to full. The only reason to keep everybody topped off all the time is if you're worried about unexpected damage killing someone. But in FF14, all attacks are scripted, so there is no such thing as unexpected damage.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

The fact that JP has a Savage clear rate of 40%+ means that actually, a majority of players are going to stick with it (it's going to be 50%+ for those who bother to do Extreme and above type of content).

On both JP and NA players have complained repeatedly about job homogenization and JP is often even more vocal about it.

The matter of fact is that increasing the skill ceiling does not hurt casual players in any way, because they wouldn't ever need to reach that skill ceiling to comfortably clear content in FF14. But decreasing the skill ceiling hurts skilled players.

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40% is still not a majority, and it can be very difficult to predict trends like savage participation based on sudden bursts of interest.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

40% is still not a majority, and it can be very difficult to predict trends like savage participation based on sudden bursts of interest.

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That 40% is full tier completion rate, before the tier has been cycled out of current content, and based only on mount ownership iirc. Savage participation rate in jp will be higher, almost certainly reaching over 50%.

Well, they just dumbed down PvP and it's considered a success, with lot of players, etc.

We were already worried about the direction, dumbing down everything, predictable and short-lived content, etc. with ARR and HW. But they proved us wrong, all they need is the brand and marketing.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

40% is still not a majority, and it can be very difficult to predict trends like savage participation based on sudden bursts of interest.

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40% doesn't make it 1% either like many people claim.

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Originally Posted by Genz

Well, they just dumbed down PvP and it's considered a success, with lot of players, etc.

We were already worried about the direction, dumbing down everything, predictable and short-lived content, etc. with ARR and HW. But they proved us wrong, all they need is the brand and marketing.

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PvP was already a dumbed down version of your class, now it is a slightly dumber downed version but the intelligent thing they did was make everyone there own healer. Healers made PvP miserable.

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

But i think some DPS abilities should be tied towards the HP of teammates. If their HP is lower, your dps also will.

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That's certainly an interesting idea and could have merit, but I see a couple of issues.

If someone has a "healer adjust" mentality, the healer will not just have to try to keep them alive when they're increasing the burden on the healer but now they'll be punished if they can't keep that person's HP high.

It also doesn't allow the flexibility to let the team stay at what is still a safe level and push out dps when you know damage isn't coming soon.

I think the biggest issue is that even that idea won't fix the issue of healing not being necessary. It would need a further corollary that party dps overall goes down if HP goes down. But then you run the risk of the rest of the group having to take on the burden of a weaker healer or a healer who is utilizing those instances of low damage to push out dps.

I think the flexibility issue could be fixed by not having the dps loss trigger until a certain percentage of HP is lost. So that would still not require healers to heal every little bit of health. But I'm not sure how to implement something fairly where anyone's dps is based on whether others stay alive or not.

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Originally Posted by IdowhatIwant

40% doesn't make it 1% either like many people claim.



PvP was already a dumbed down version of your class, now it is a slightly dumber downed version but the intelligent thing they did was make everyone there own healer. Healers made PvP miserable.

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So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

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We were discussing about how many people stick to hard content.

If we assume a 41% participation rate, then the answer is pretty much everyone. You can slowly increase this percentage and the answer will always be "pretty much everyone", until you reach 51%. At this point, the majority of the JP playerbase tries harder content. The participion rate could also be 80% and then "only" 50% of them actually end up completing said content.

None of this actually matters because regardless of the exact percentages we already know that a significant portion of the playerbase completes hard content and this is enough to say that dumbing down the game and removing complexity is unhealthy for the game and the playerbase. The "hard content is just a small niche" argument doesn't make sense and it's even dumber because as someone already said you can increase the skill ceiling without impacting the floor.

Cure lovers can keep sniffing glue in Smileton while WHM raiders can play the job they want to love without feeling like they were lobotomized against their will. It's not mutually exclusive.

It's funny that a lot of the healer simplification occurred because "We're worried people won't play healers" or "we want to make the healer wait times not as bad."

In Tera, another MMO, healing was actually enjoyable and it had quite a few spinning plates. You needed to regularly debuff the boss, regularly buff your allies, manage your allies' mana, and you even had a burst phase dps style rotation to do when it came off cd along with long CD skills to remember. Harder bosses had buffs that needed to be purged or your party would wipe immediately. You could heal party members through the bad so they could keep their uptime. Our version of Rescue was actually good, so you could grab someone at the last possible second and genuinely rescue them from death unlike here where people get snapshotted. You could use your cleanse (think "Esuna") and time it so well that the debuff wouldn't even appear on their end; it'd disappear as soon as it started. So unlike XIV, where you can esuna a Slow but still have the party member stuck dealing with it for a tick, in tera your party members actually benefited from your hair trigger reaction time. This also meant there was pressure. Pressure to do well. Room to grow. An absurd ability to carry groups through sheer force of will. It was a lot to take in. It was easy to perform poorly. And it was fun. I knew loads of other healers. I often had to change to a DPS role so we could fit a healer in our party. We had a surplus of them at one point. The game's shutting down now due to mismanagement, and there's a private server running. Healers have the longest queue of any other job. People are healing on a private server in droves, that's literally how fun the role could be if the devs just stopped being afraid of giving healer mains an involved kit with a learning curve, and content that demanded the full use of it (I mean more than the 5% of content that constitutes savage/ultimate; it's so gross that the vast majority of this game's content straight up doesn't require a healer present at all depending on your comp. In that other game, not having a healer led to a noticeable difference because the team ran out of mana and couldn't do anything, bosses wouldn't get debuffed so they'd take longer to kill, cooldown reduction buffs weren't going out so your whole rotation felt scuffed, it felt awful. Across all difficulties. I wish we'd experience that here. Not everyone's trying to get gaped by Ultimates, but we'd still like to not fall asleep while playing the game.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

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It's from the last census which is based on players that have the savage mount, and the pet from normal raids. JP servers highest completion was 46% NA server was 22%. JPs lowest completion server was 22% NAs lowest was 1%. So yes depending on server it can be 1% but this is all on RP servers. Gilgamesh is the highest server at the 22%. These numbers don't include people that have not gotten the mount or have not completed all 4 sections, it's soley the number of players that have completed all 4 sections and won the roll on the mount. So the actual number of people that completed savage would be higher, and the number that participated would be even higher. So at least for some JP servers you can easily say a majority of players participated in savage raiding. NA/EU is another story, I guess theres a higher % of players that are into doing nothing in the game.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

In Tera, another MMO, healing was actually enjoyable and it had quite a few spinning plates.

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Your argument says a lot more about what you like to do as a healer than anything about FFXIV in general. Having to play whack-a-mole with an addon in WoW, I wasn't enamored with healing in general but find it to be fine in this game. That says a lot more about what I like to do as a healer, by the way.

Considering that Tera currently has an average of about 20 players a day this month after Gameforge announced the shutdown of servers at the end of June 2022, one cannot say that the game was super successful in drawing players with its gameplay. Still, #32 out of the top 134 MMOs isn't bad for the genre.

Blaming Gameforge for mismanagement, rather than lack of profitability for this free to play game is a bit much ... it was already beginning to show its age.

If anyone is interested in looking at Tera on console (Gameforge doesn't handle the console version), you can look this up to see what you think: https://bluntlyhonestreviews.com/mmo...aying-in-2022/

One reason people play MMOs is for customization. Dressing the characters, races, even motivating people to RP. Having a "large amount" of buttons or skills may seem encumbering, but truth be told, it helps players avoid a Cookie Cutter build. In wow, before I left, that's all there was. Simplifying builds and skills may make it lose its flavor.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Considering that Tera currently has an average of about 20 players a day this month after Gameforge announced the shutdown of servers at the end of June 2022, one cannot say that the game was super successful in drawing players with its gameplay. Still, #32 out of the top 134 MMOs isn't bad for the genre.

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The long term success and health of MMOs is a complex beast and there's far more to than simply 'is the gameplay good'.

Two great examples of this would be Everquest and Warhammer Online:

Everquest is what you would call a Horizontal Progression MMO. Old content and equipment generally isn't automatically rendered obsolete with a new content drop or expansion and as such, these games can survive mass player exoduses on a comparative shoestring budget. As long as the publisher is willing to keep a skeleton development team there to keep things ticking over, these types of MMOs will generally endure irrespective of how good or bad they are comparitively. UO, EQ1, FFXI, even KR Lineage are a testament to this.

Warhammer Online is a Vertical Progress or Theme Park MMO as popularised by World of Warcraft. These kinds of MMOs will typically render old content and equipment obsolete in a hurry. Old content tends to be trivialised and/or simply worthless outside of achievements, titles and glamours. Thus a much faster pace of development post launch is absolutely required. Where FFXIV and WoW are examples of where this has been done well, Warhammer Online was the poster child for a game with amazing potential, great gameplay and truly unique PvP that floundered post launch and promptly died out due to not getting nearly enough new content post launch.

Korean potion guzzlers are no exception, who the blame lays with is irrelevant really. The game wasn't getting fresh content. Large swathes of prior content was worthless. The end result is a dead game.