"A system that rewards effort and innovation" can't be buzzwords for imbalance-get

[Tsuga]

The best example I've seen of an encounter rewarding diversity was the first part of the Alexander fight in ToAU, where Raubahn developed resistances to the predominant damage types in his second and third incarnations, encouraging parties to have a melee DD, magic DD and a ranged DD. This of course forced the party to be balanced for the second part of the fight as well.

Things like that would be great, but then you have the issue of being forced to have a certain job type. What if nobody from your LS has levelled that job, or there's nobody free online from one of those jobs? It's the same issue that we had in XI where we couldn't even level unless we had a fairly specific setup for a party.

[Lerris]

Since Raubahn only developed a 50% immunity each time, it was very manageable with only two of the three damage types. And the three damage types were broad enough to allow a lot of leeway in jobs.

[Peregrine]

Things like that would be great, but then you have the issue of being forced to have a certain job type. What if nobody from your LS has levelled that job, or there's nobody free online from one of those jobs? It's the same issue that we had in XI where we couldn't even level unless we had a fairly specific setup for a party.

If your LS is made of a bunch of thaumaturges and archers, maybe you should think more about game balance and playing fairly and less about conveniently levelling the imbalance in the game. I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a large group here who only levels and only plays the imbalanced jobs because they like how the imbalance makes them feel and like how it gets them treated. I'm saying it's not very admirable and should be developed against.

If there are not enough of the other jobs, then the developers are already too late and have already failed to balance the jobs for so long that they've quit like they did in FFXI. In FFXI, meleers got massive enhancements to the point where black mage and ranger almost went extinct because the devs had a choice. Either enhance meleers and piss off the spoiled ranged attackers...or lose 70% of the game's population who refuse to "just level black mage if you want to be useful."

FFXI was so Darwinistic against meleers that everyone and their brother already knew instinctively to level archer and mages in this game. That lancer was going to be a bad investment from the start. The developers evolved and encouraged players to be like this.

How FFXI treated dragoons, thieves, and dark knights for 4 years was the reason it never got half of WoW's subscriptions. The game was a playland for rangers and mages, and the meleers paid to keep their lights on.

Now that the "just doesn't get it" is being fixed, there are two massive threats to this game assuming they can actually develop 8/10 content like they promise. The first is RMT and cheating. The second is class balance.

Right now they get a D in both. This game could never have worked as-designed, because the jobs are poorly constructed in comparison to each other. It is a fundamental weakness that most players were too busy screaming about chocobos to notice, and it's a huge issue.

None of Yoshida's to-do boxes addresses the 2nd most, arguably most important going concern for the game where it's grossly failing. Class/Job imbalance and poor design.

Whoever designed thaumaturges and archers should not be let near the new system, because that person fundamentally does not understand the consequences of their decisions.