The Existence Of Failure Is Why Success Feels Good

It's strange how for a game where the MSQ literally showcases multiple civilizations falling apart because they either have full understanding of all that is and will be without deviation (meaning there is no uncertainty in life) or because they have so thoroughly eliminated suffering that success feels meaningless, and yet these are the very design philosophies that have piloted this game increasingly more and more since Shadowbringers' launch.

The unifying trend in every single change is that this game is TERRIFIED you might feel something negative, ever, at any point, for any reason.

Every single DPS change reflects this. Monk in DT is designed so that you can't mess up or drift your rotation anymore, therefore the possibility of failure is removed. SAM doesn't have a 20 gauge costing buff anymore because what if you had messed up gauge management when it was time to hit that iaijutsu button? BLM would hate for you to risk making a mistake in your rotation, so they lock-step in exactly what your rotation should be and make sure you can't misread what to press at any time ever. Viper doesn't have a debuff because people sometimes actually messed up juggling that mechanic, and GOD FORBID! Positionals are being removed en masse because GOD FORBID someone have to reposition and mess it up.

This extends out to healers and tanks, to dungeon design, to EVERYTHING in this game. Why is Frontlines forced random matchmaking? Because it feels bad if anyone has consistency and YOU don't. Why can't you talk in Crystalline Conflict, where finer detail communication would be absurdly helpful? Because what if someone gets toxic? You might have a bad experience. God forbid!

I am so sick of meaningless "wins" that come at the cost of the possibility of failure. I have played a lot since DT launch and in that time I have wiped once in an alliance raid, once in a dungeon (it wasn't a DT one btw) and once in the first trial of DT. And that's all.

Victory only holds meaning because defeat is possible. Success holds meaning only if failure is possible.

Old FLs were people could choose their team lead to hilarious problems with every regular pvper just queued for maelstrom, messing up the queues hardcore and usually spelling the doom of the two other teams in 99% of the games. Then when they made freelance queue mandatory for everyone, we still had 8 men premades abusing the imbalanced jobs (ninja notably) because SE can't balance frontlines and thinks the mode is good enough for casuals to have mindless fun.

I'd be okay with re-enabling chat in the arena mode as long as they do moderate it seriously. And I mean seriously. Old Feast was cancer in chat and I'm glad it's gone. Perhaps it could be better, but due to human beings being what they are, no, we can't have nice things.

I do agree that SE has become utterly horrified at the idea of failure states in job design however, and every time you'll see them speak of "reducing player stress" you truly know what it is about.

I think the core of the issue is in a lot of examples you've listed there were fail states that weren't rewarding to avoid. the problem is the game has taken away a lot of difficult job mechanics that were objectively bad or unfun (like TP!!!) were never given something new and more interesting to manage. A lot of old job mechanics like blood of the dragon or greased lightning were only felt when messing them up and losing your gauge stacks. Keeping them up wasn't super hard and didn't feel that rewarding to do so compared to how bad it felt not to do it. Positionals suffer the same issue because there's such a lack of feedback of when you play jobs correctly. There's no visual or audio clue that tells you if a positional is hit and the damage difference isn't very noticeable until you calculate how much dps was lost over the course of the fight. The game lacks dopamine rewards for playing jobs correctly but has obvious pain points when you don't. The game is also balanced around being an mmo with people of various skill levels and they want to reduce the potential for friction in groups. I don't mind certain things like stance dancing being removed from tanks but i do mind tanks lost an entire gcd combo with the removal of aggro combos and were given no new combos in exchange. I'm convinced this was done to make gunbreaker more attractive in shadowbringers. Thank goodness they changed delirium into an actual combo this expansion because 3 spillers and 1-2-souleater was visually very boring. I empathize with wanting jobs to feel deeper again(rip SB Scholar T_T) but I don't think the game needs to be more punishing, rather it needs to be more rewarding for good players.