This needs to be said

Hello,

I normally don't post on the forums so I wasn't sure where to put this so I just decided to put it here.

With the release of the Abyssos raid tier, we were explicitly told that fights would not be tuned to account for extra one week of gear or EX weapons we were able to obtain due to the delay of the savage gear, that the fight would be tuned to 610 ilvl. We found this to be a blatant lie as world-racers and week-1 raiders got to the final floor of the raid tier.

That being said, we were all willing to just accept the really tough DPS check, because even though we were lied to about the tuning of the fight, it was still doable. The higher end community as a whole identified the real reason for the struggles in this fight quite quickly by looking at the representation of jobs that managed to clear: Job balance. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that certain jobs are heavily under-represented in the first week of clears.

Now clearly, Square Enix does have some idea that job balance is an issue due to the Paladin and Warrior job changes that we've seen in this morning's patch notes. This is good, and they have also taken the approach of applying the band-aid fix of lowering the HP pool of the boss. These are not the things that I take issue with. The issue that I take is with the reasoning behind the changes.

"The team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual."

This statement right here was the biggest gut punch, so I'm going to go ahead and call it out: There is no world where your balance team tested and tuned this fight to be clearable with every comp at full 610 iLvl. Whatever the reason, your balance and dev team failed, and rather than taking it on the chin and just admitting it, you came up with the bitter excuse of a sore loser that your testing team was just 'too good' and out-skilled the player base.

It is insulting that you would make the implication that your testing team is better at the game than people who have spent years attempting to perfect their play. I can forgive being lied to about the fight not being tuned to the week of extra gear, I can forgive not balancing out underperforming jobs outside of Paladin and Warrior just yet and applying the band-aid fix of adjusting the boss rather than the jobs.

Insinuating that your development team has more skill than many people out there that have devoted multiple years successfully clearing savage content on the first week is an affront to their time and dedication.

I can't speak for every person out there that has dedicated time into becoming a strong player, but I personally am appalled at the poor excuses that Square Enix has given regarding this matter. I feel that Square Enix is going in the direction of Blizzard with how horrendous the balance and PR has been, and rather than just sweeping it under the rug, something needed to be said about it.

Fix your game, Square.

This tier also blows the "Fights aren't tuned to account for healer DPS" folks argument out of the water as well.

The balancing team literally gets payed to be exceedingly good at the game. The amount of players that clear savage that get payed to play the game is likely less than 1%. Also odds are the balancing team has just as much time played, if not more, then the "people who have spent years attempting to perfect their play". I don't have proof of that, but you don't have proof of the contrary so its a mute point. Odds are that their balancing team is infact more skilled than the average player attempting to do savage, especially the average player attempting to do week 1 savage. That doesn't mean there aren't players that are on-par or better than the balancing team, but you have to understand that it is part of their job to play as well as possible. The motivating factor of money is a surprisingly strong one.

I personally don't agree with their decision to nerf the boss, maybe buffing some of the weaker jobs is fine but overall nerfing the boss is going a step too far in my personal opinion.

You really shouldnt get your panties on a bunch. If im not mistaken the wording was that the teams overall performance was higher then normal, which dont know about you but me just being a peon with ok playing skill i can deffinately see how sometimes i might play much better then other days. And in truth if they spent a lot of time testing it you know what they say practice makes perfect. Lots of factors to look at.

I have no doubt in my mind that their balancing team is more skilled than the average player in the game. Heck, I'm willing to bet that they are pretty good at the game. However, to think that their dev team is so good at the game that the entire community, even at the top tier of play, notices a problem with how out-of-whack job balance is within a day or two is copium at best.

To be clear, I'm not talking about balancing for the average player. The average player is entirely unaffected by any of this, fight was totally fine un-nerfed from week 2 onward. I'm only talking about the playerbase that is attempting week-1, which I do concede is a vast minority.

Minority or not though, people at that level of play do deserve to have a voice, particularly when it comes to content that's supposed to be catered specifically to them.

I do want to make it perfectly clear that the balance itself is not the frustrating part. Having to change what you play in order to have a chance at week 1 is something that, unfortunately, can and will happen. Mistakes happen during balancing and I don't blame them for making mistakes. I'm merely stating that their statement regarding the skill of the balance team holds no water.

Make no mistake, from week-2 onwards, even un-nerfed, the fight itself is not a problem. This argument is literally only for the players that go through the process of trying to clear week-1, which is an incredibly small portion of the playerbase, but one that deserves to have a voice nonetheless.

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

I have no doubt in my mind that their balancing team is more skilled than the average player in the game. Heck, I'm willing to bet that they are pretty good at the game. However, to think that their dev team is so good at the game that the entire community, even at the top tier of play, notices a problem with how out-of-whack job balance is within a day or two is copium at best.

To be clear, I'm not talking about balancing for the average player. The average player is entirely unaffected by any of this, fight was totally fine un-nerfed from week 2 onward. I'm only talking about the playerbase that is attempting week-1, which I do concede is a vast minority.

Minority or not though, people at that level of play do deserve to have a voice, particularly when it comes to content that's supposed to be catered specifically to them.

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Good job balance is technically only important for week 1 raiders but in practice many more people will feel its lack. We've seen paladins get locked out of PFs back in asphodelos and while most of those PFs were out of their minds to lock paladin out of stuff like p1s and p2s, the image of good job balance is as important as good job balance itself. People who love playing paladin and warrior shouldnt have to feel like they are holding their party back specifically because of the job choice. That feeling has to be reserved for skill issues.

I can see how it sounds, but their skill level probably did become good from repeating the content. They were probably doing it with a good job composition as well.

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Originally Posted by Last_Username

The balancing team literally gets payed to be exceedingly good at the game. The amount of players that clear savage that get payed to play the game is likely less than 1%. Also odds are the balancing team has just as much time played, if not more, then the "people who have spent years attempting to perfect their play".

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This is a good point. The people who get paid to play this game, mostly, are streamers and content creators. There isn't any magic about why they go around clearing savage and ultimate before everyone else, they just have more time to do it than most players who have to spend a lot of their time doing a job that isn't related to the game. Spending more time on the game usually translates to being better at it as well.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Good job balance is technically only important for week 1 raiders but in practice many more people will feel its lack. We've seen paladins get locked out of PFs back in asphodelos and while most of those PFs were out of their minds to lock paladin out of stuff like p1s and p2s, the image of good job balance is as important as good job balance itself. People who love playing paladin and warrior shouldnt have to feel like they are holding their party back specifically because of the job choice. That feeling has to be reserved for skill issues.

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Adding to this some people seem to forget that balance still affects lower gameplay levels as well.
If a PLD is signifcantly behind DRK, he is at pretty much all gameplay levels. The average PLD is still weaker than the average DRK, not just the top-tier PLD weaker than the top-tier DRK. So the average player will also feel the lack of job balance; they reach the tight dps checks later and have gear to make up for their lack of skill compared to a top-tier group but they are still affected.
While the average PLD can just "git gud" and definitely has more to worry about than being inherently weaker it still doesn't change the fact that if a class is noticeably ahead, it is at all gameplay levels. Balance makes or breaks kills for week 1 raiders but it still trickles down into midcore/ casual statics as well.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I can see how it sounds, but their skill level probably did become good from repeating the content. They were probably doing it with a good job composition as well.

This is a good point. The people who get paid to play this game, mostly, are streamers and content creators. There isn't any magic about why they go around clearing savage and ultimate before everyone else, they just have more time to do it than most players who have to spend a lot of their time doing a job that isn't related to the game. Spending more time on the game usually translates to being better at it as well.

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And that is a bigger problem than they gave it credit for.
I'm sorry but I struggle to believe that a party of experienced 1st week raiders that all sit around 99% uptime (or more), potted twice, have no deaths, no damage down, only minor rotational mistakes if any is so far behind in terms of gameplay that they can't clear the doorboss while the team from SE can; some of the first week logs that ended with wipe after wipe were amazing in terms of gameplay and they still failed because they had some classes that were simply too much behind others. Comp had to play a role in this.
Trying to to twist it into a "Guess we got too good" as the only reason won't work.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

Adding to this some people seem to forget that balance still affects lower gameplay levels as well.
If a PLD is signifcantly behind DRK, he is at pretty much all gameplay levels. The average PLD is still weaker than the average DRK, not just the top-tier PLD weaker than the top-tier DRK. So the average player will also feel the lack of job balance; they reach the tight dps checks later and have gear to make up for their lack of skill compared to a top-tier group but they are still affected.
While the average PLD can just "git gud" and definitely has more to worry about than being inherently weaker it still doesn't change the fact that if a class is noticeably ahead, it is at all gameplay levels. Balance makes or breaks kills for week 1 raiders but it still trickles down into midcore/ casual statics as well.



And that is a bigger problem than they gave it credit for.
I'm sorry but I struggle to believe that a party of experienced 1st week raiders that all sit around 99% uptime (or more), potted twice, have no deaths, no damage down, only minor rotational mistakes if any is so far behind in terms of gameplay that they can't clear the doorboss while the team from SE can; some of the first week logs that ended with wipe after wipe were amazing in terms of gameplay and they still failed because they had some classes that were simply too much behind others. Comp had to play a role in this.
Trying to to twist it into a "Guess we got too good" as the only reason won't work.

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100% this. Weak comps of average players in casual statics or PF will still need to grind more gear.
However if switching to better job is easier and gives more dps than getting gear or getting better on weaker ones then playing these weak jobs only for their flavor etc. does feel like griefing to a certain degree.

Also PLD strict rotation punishes weaker players more, not only you do lower dmg on average you can screw your rotation more easily.

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

Insinuating that your development team has more skill than many people out there that have devoted multiple years successfully clearing savage content on the first week is an affront to their time and dedication.

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I am curious, as you are a top tier player, do you find your performance in any one fight improves with practice? Without changing the composition of your static, that a brand-new DPS check might well be be 1% faster the 20th time your static does it?
(I haven't seen this fight first hand, of course, and my question is sincere - So please forgive me if I misspeak)

I do accept the claim that there is no way that they tested all permutations, so that's not my question. But that "could your static improve 1% in 20 tries" question comes to the heart of my query.


"However, as extra time was dedicated to testing this battle, the team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual".

This tier was completed with less oversight than usual; Yoshida stated in an interview that he didn't actually finish his typical checks of the raids.

I sympathize with YoshiP, as he's in a position where he's viewed as the 'savior' of Final Fantasy, and as a result his entire career is essentially staked on the success of FF16. Thus, he's been spending a lot of focus on that game, as well as moving the attention of trusted talent to it as well. This is pure speculation, but I think this raid tier is another 'b-team' tier like Edens Verse, where the lack of experience of the developers working on it is apparent.

The notion that the balance team got 'too good' at the fights is pretty funny, as there is no amount of 'too good' that could feasibly make certain team compositions clear doorboss consistently/easily in 610 gear. All that statement has done is give more ammunition to the weird non-raiders that have been going around mocking people who are struggling with p8s. I can't even count the amount of times someone tried to imply I was simply bad at the game over the last two weeks, and it's really demoralizing on top of the state of my job.

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

"The team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual."

This statement right here was the biggest gut punch, so I'm going to go ahead and call it out: There is no world where your balance team tested and tuned this fight to be clearable with every comp at full 610 iLvl. Whatever the reason, your balance and dev team failed, and rather than taking it on the chin and just admitting it, you came up with the bitter excuse of a sore loser that your testing team was just 'too good' and out-skilled the player base.

It is insulting that you would make the implication that your testing team is better at the game than people who have spent years attempting to perfect their play. I can forgive being lied to about the fight not being tuned to the week of extra gear, I can forgive not balancing out underperforming jobs outside of Paladin and Warrior just yet and applying the band-aid fix of adjusting the boss rather than the jobs.

Insinuating that your development team has more skill than many people out there that have devoted multiple years successfully clearing savage content on the first week is an affront to their time and dedication.

I can't speak for every person out there that has dedicated time into becoming a strong player, but I personally am appalled at the poor excuses that Square Enix has given regarding this matter. I feel that Square Enix is going in the direction of Blizzard with how horrendous the balance and PR has been, and rather than just sweeping it under the rug, something needed to be said about it.

Fix your game, Square.

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Honestly this didn’t need to be said. At all. I don’t think the post was trying to be disrespectful and you are offended because someone said things in a way you found hurtful to your pride. SE apologized in their post and is making corrections. This is just Karen behavior.

You do have a point about job balance but the way you delivered your message on this forum is way more toxic than the post SE did. You are not going to gain anything by being offended and using accusatory language other than disdain and animosity.

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

"The team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual."

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It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it. I can only assume they don't care if we believe it and hope the casual players will latch onto the excuse and drown our voices out.

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps. Their secret god-tier dev team is a fabrication.

The dev team is sadly going the way of Blizzard. Arrogance, dislike for the players, "we know best", lies, excuses and sweeping things under the rug. All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

I sympathize with YoshiP, as he's in a position where he's viewed as the 'savior' of Final Fantasy, and as a result his entire career is essentially staked on the success of FF16. Thus, he's been spending a lot of focus on that game, as well as moving the attention of trusted talent to it as well. This is pure speculation, but I think this raid tier is another 'b-team' tier like Edens Verse, where the lack of experience of the developers working on it is apparent.

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Yoshi-P did answer that directly in one of the FF16 interviews, where he explained that people from his team have been working on FF16 since the beginning of Stormblood, so you would have to judge the quality difference since that long ago.

He said he is confident there isn't a situation where people are stressed juggling both jobs except Soken. He's letting someone else do most of the management of FF16 and they just report to him and come to him for advice.

He did confirm some people have fully left the FF14 team for the FF16 one but obviously they have employed new staff and trained them for years since the beginning of Stormblood.

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

This statement right here was the biggest gut punch

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Nah, even the devs know. Players bad devs good. hehe

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps.

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Thanks :) I will take that as a fair and good answer to my naïve question!

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it. I can only assume they don't care if we believe it and hope the casual players will latch onto the excuse and drown our voices out.

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps. Their secret god-tier dev team is a fabrication.

The dev team is sadly going the way of Blizzard. Arrogance, dislike for the players, "we know best", lies, excuses and sweeping things under the rug. All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

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Is this common with FFXIV? To basically just have imbalanced jobs and then hide it by slowly increasing the ilvl so eventually all comps can do it by essentially brute-forcing it? that seems pretty nasty for those that really enjoy the harder content in the game.

I'm about as casual as you can get, but I think you guys/girls/people deserve better.

The short answer to your question is yes, over time anyone is going to improve with practice to a certain degree. To me difference in skill is not difference in skill ceiling, it's rate of improvement.

Ultimately that's not the point here, though. The point is that the team is trying to use their testing team's 'higher than usual performance' to sweep a much bigger issue under the rug. The bigger issue is that certain team compositions have zero leeway. I wouldn't mind if the DPS check was so tight that you couldn't afford a mistake on ANY job, in fact I'd enjoy that to no end, it's just a bigger challenge to overcome. The problem is that with specific compositions, you cannot afford a single mistake or damage down and even then you are at the mercy of damage variance, and with others you have much more leeway for mistakes.

As a quick aside, damage variance in this game is about 5% in either direction. After all the weirdness of crit and direct hit that compounds to about 12% in either direction. In a perfect world if they wanted to tightly tune a fight they would make it so that no matter your composition, you would have to make about the median of this variance in order to clear. The problem is that there are compositions that can ignore variance entirely, and other compositions that can only clear if they're on the upper end of this variance. Baring in mind that this is all for penta-melded crafted with no tome or EX weapon.

Depending on party composition, you could either afford to take a few damage downs or you were forced into a position that you absolutely had to play perfectly. The reasoning that 'our testing team was just too good' or 'performing higher than usual' doesn't hold water because there were teams that were performing perfectly and still struggling due to their party composition, as I believe someone earlier pointed out: No damage downs, consistently performing the mechanics with no deaths, on top of only negligible rotation errors.

Rather than job-balance being acknowledged as a legitimate problem, however, they chose to say that it was just their testing team's performance being higher than usual. One of the reasons that I'm so heated about this is that it's because either they're oblivious to job balance being out of whack or ignorant and at this point I'm not sure which one is worse.

Thank you for that explanation too :) I appreciate understanding the problem the top-teir players are facing.

People only blame everything on job balance, did you ever think what is the current skill level on average player base now? It is really low.... That is why people are getting traps on party finder
From SE perspective, they cant say player sucks, so they only can say is all their fault.
With one week delay, there is no DPS check already until p8s. It is literally mechanics check.
Did you even know a lot of player especially DPS do not even pot or eat this tier's food and still clear the raid?
Did you know people cheese the fight and skip mechanics with healer lb 3 and tank lb 3 when the savage (non-causal content) release in day 2? Then what is the point of design the mechanics?

Ah yes the balance team. The team that tests and defines the job balance. The team that thought healers are fine and that having a dedicated healer that was "too good" was a bad idea. The team that has no dedicated tank player.

That balance team?

*remembers the healer that was too good for their testing team*
Uh-oh, I assume 8 people are about to be fired. lmao

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

Ah yes the balance team. The team that tests and defines the job balance. The team that thought healers are fine and that having a dedicated healer that was "too good" was a bad idea. The team that has no dedicated tank player.

That balance team?

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That was a heck of a hivemind moment, lol.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it.

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And I don't understand why people are so willing to believe the devs are lying instead.

Sure, they could be lying, but to what end? Historically they're not afraid to admit they've made balancing errors, so why would they suddenly start lying about it now? Who benefits by lying instead of just saying "sorry, we over tuned the fight"?

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

I have no doubt in my mind that their balancing team is more skilled than the average player in the game. Heck, I'm willing to bet that they are pretty good at the game. However, to think that their dev team is so good at the game that the entire community, even at the top tier of play, notices a problem with how out-of-whack job balance is within a day or two is copium at best.

To be clear, I'm not talking about balancing for the average player. The average player is entirely unaffected by any of this, fight was totally fine un-nerfed from week 2 onward. I'm only talking about the playerbase that is attempting week-1, which I do concede is a vast minority.

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I think one of the bigger problems is the battle design team doesn't seem to be communicating with the job balance team.

Tuning a fight to be difficult is fine.

Tuning a fight that literally can't be accomplished by a certain group comp isn't.

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Originally Posted by zabu

From SE perspective, they cant say player sucks, so they only can say is all their fault.

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Can't point to hard at the players when they are showing definitive proof of 98% uptime / perfect CD management and still missing enrages.

Savage Content shouldn't require players to play perfectly, that's what ultimate is for.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

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Seriously. Why has this been so hard for them the last few expansions? People are extremely forgiving when people admit mistake and fix them.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

I think one of the bigger problems is the battle design team doesn't seem to be communicating with the job balance team.
Can't point to hard at the players when they are showing definitive proof of 98% uptime / perfect CD management and still missing enrages.

Savage Content shouldn't require players to play perfectly, that's what ultimate is for.

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I did not say need to be perfect, the fault tolerance is way too big, you can have 4+ people die and still clear the raid. Mechanics got cheesed to clear the raid. Crappy food and no pot. Some folks do not even know their rotation or mitigation. This is like doing extreme mode. Is that really fun?

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Originally Posted by yoshinoharu

There is no world where your balance team tested and tuned this fight to be clearable with every comp at full 610 iLvl.

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5 choices for melee * 3 choices for physical ranged * 3 choices for magical ranged * 6 tank pairs * 6 healer pairs = 1620 possible seven-person party compositions with one player per job. Multiply that by… 4, I think, to get the number of eight-person party compositions? Anyway, I doubt SE is devoting the resources to exhaustively test that many combinations.

They're taking shortcuts, and it's not difficult to imagine how it might work to set the DPS check:

1. They start with the internal testing team's DPS with their chosen party compositions. They have some expectation for how players of some certain skill level playing those same compositions compare to the testing team, so they take the testing team's DPS and shift it up or down to get something appropriate for the players.

2. They then take into account that some party compositions will naturally perform worse than the ones they used in testing, so they shift the DPS down to accommodate those less-performant compositions.

3. They then take into account natural damage variance and shift the DPS down to cover some not-small range of that variance.

So, it doesn't matter how well SE understands job balance (2) and damage variance (3) if they start from a bad baseline (1) because they misjudged where the players would land relative to themselves, which can happen when their testing team's performance improves unexpectedly.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

And I don't understand why people are so willing to believe the devs are lying instead.

Sure, they could be lying, but to what end? Historically they're not afraid to admit they've made balancing errors, so why would they suddenly start lying about it now? Who benefits by lying instead of just saying "sorry, we over tuned the fight"?

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They also have no reason to lie either technically. There's a lot of ways they can easily twist things around to suit whatever purpose they might need without having to outright lie and put themselves in a position where they can be caught.

It seems the community has forgotten how Twintania was when it first released. P8S isn't the first time this was an issue.

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Originally Posted by WellGramarye

It seems the community has forgotten how Twintania was when it first released. P8S isn't the first time this was an issue.

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But this is the first time it has been an issue since A6S, and raiding changed quite a lot since then.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

And I don't understand why people are so willing to believe the devs are lying instead.

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Because 1) SE has lied to us in the past, and 2) When SE's response is essentially "Our testing team is just too good to accurately represent our idiot playerbase so we'll nerf it for you plebs", it's easy to assume that they're willing to lie to us as well.