The Developers Need to Start Surveying Players After Every Patch

[Andrea]

That would not be practical or helpful in the long run. Such frequent surveying would lead to indecision and paralysis of development as each month you would get a new series of priorities or directives from the latest survey which might contradict the prior month, or simply be impractical, and for major features/revisions, you may end up waiting for the survey instead of proceeding.

Games are to an extent an artform, and sometimes you have to let the creators create.

Come to think on it I could understand why it would cause some problems, my bad

[therpgfanatic]

Come to think on it I could understand why it would cause some problems, my bad

Kosmos is just trolling.

Think more critically about this. Imagine you are an employee at a company tasked with monitoring player feedback. Rather than running surveys, they ask you to read every forum post and social media tweet about the game.

How effective do you think you'd be at identifying how players feel when complaints are hidden 3 or 4 pages into a thread? There's a lot of stuff that would be missed. You probably wouldn't even be able to keep up with all the posts made in this forum per day, let alone trying to monitor social media conversations, too.

That's why surveys were invented to begin with. To ask specific questions that produce answers which can be easily compared by those who analyze the results. This may be a game, but it is also a business. They aren't making FFXIV for their personal enjoyment, it is a product to sell to consumers. There's no "development paralysis" with data guided development. It's the exact opposite because it shows where to focus development resources.

Furthermore based on analyzing the SSS dummies, people have determined what the optimal DPS output is for each class. PLD is the weakest DPS in the entire game, even below healers. Healers.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...=2&pli=1#gid=0

Yet strangely no one is crying about how OP healers are.

[Aryalandi]

You say Kosmos is trolling but you are the one calling unceasingly for /tanks/ to be broken. I thought that you quit?
Lol.. not saying you need to go away just saying you still being here arguing about this after saying you were going to quit because "this was the last straw" makes you seem like more of a troll than the first responder you called out earlier.

SE is going to do things their own way, people obviously still enjoy the game or it would be dead, it is distinctly not dead. And is quite enjoyable even when jobs are not left broken.

[therpgfanatic]

You say Kosmos is trolling but you are the one calling unceasingly for /tanks/ to be broken. I thought that you quit? Days ago.
Lol.. not saying you need to go away just saying you still being here arguing about this after saying you were going to quit because "this was the last straw" makes you seem like more of a troll than the first responder you called out earlier.

Heaven forbid I read a thread I started and respond.

My sub hasn't ran out yet. I'm not renewing.

Here's a better question: Why do you care so much to even respond, other than to troll?

[Aryalandi]

Boredom sitting at work, as someone who is going to continue to play the game until it shuts down and as a paladin on several characters i take a vested interest in my job not being broken. Also because I just find it silly to entirely dismiss valid points in favor of ones own arguments. And since this topic is still stuck at the tank thing that makes it of personal interest.

Also i agree with the fact that having a survey after every patch would be a huge issue after awhile. Those sorts of things work once in awhile and especially for new games looking for a direction, xiv already has a direction.

A once every few months survey would be fine, but after every patch? That is kind of a waste of the dev teams time honestly, especially with such a huge player base, sifting through that many replies looking for a majority vote would be painful.

[therpgfanatic]

Really? Everquest tanks did equal damage to DPS?
As a longtime player of EQ1, EQOA, & EQ2 I can say that's not true.

It totally is true.

Realize that I am not referring to the DPS specs for Warrior, Paladin and Dark Knight and comparing those specs to EQ tank output, but fact remains EQ tanks were quite strong. I doubt the forum posts still exist at Allakazam from way back then, but I recall Jeff Kaplan and Rob Pardo being well known for their rants about tanking, and these opinions led to some early issues in tank design in WoW (namely the disparity between Paladins as tanks, and Warriors as tanks -- in EQ Paladin, as a hybrid was viewed as a better tank whereas Kaplan and Pardo were of the view if you are a hybrid you should be weaker than a pure class, and this design mindset created issues in WoW which seemingly are being repeated in FFXIV with Paladin design -- if I had to guess, PLD are being punished with lower DPS simply because the class has access to WHM spells, and now Clemency) which were not adequately addressed until WoTLK where they finally realized any disparity between tank DPS and mitigation would create frustrations in players who selected the less ideal tank class, leading to a tank shortage problem.

FFXIV has a tank shortage problem because they have intentionally made WAR the best, DRK 2nd best and PLD the worst. A lot of people choose PLD and don't realize the tanking disparity until they have already heavily invested into leveling the character. This causes frustration in players of the least desirable tanks, which leads to the shortage issue when they either stop playing a tank or leave the game altogether for somewhere else that doesn't have this problem. And the tank shortage problem will continue until the tanks are made equal.

Boredom sitting at work, as someone who is going to continue to play the game until it shuts down and as a paladin on several characters i take a vested interest in my job not being broken.

PLD having equal DPS output as WARs would not result in them being "broken", and that you feign interest for this reason only serves to reveal you are trolling.

[Aryalandi]

>.> funny i just saw it argued that dark knight was the worst with bad abilities the other day, and before that warrior. Perspective is funny that way.

There is a shortage of both tanks and healers because they are harder to play than dps in the way you are responsible for more than just yourself. Dark Knight is popular because it comes with awesome black armor and a giant sword, along with its amazing "all about me" storyline almost as much as it is for the gameplay.

You can argue all you like about how paladin is bad and tanks are bad and they should be strength based but as a paladin and a tank I am calling you out on it~

[Lambdafish]

FFXIV has a tank shortage problem because they have intentionally made WAR the best, DRK 2nd best and PLD the worst. A lot of people choose PLD and don't realize the tanking disparity until they have already heavily invested into leveling the character. This causes frustration in players of the least desirable tanks, which leads to the shortage issue when they either stop playing a tank or leave the game altogether for somewhere else that doesn't have this problem. And the tank shortage problem will continue until the tanks are made equal.

The fact that you say this and still complain about tank changes shows how much of a misunderstanding of the reason that the nerf happened you have. The nerd happened for 2 reasons:

1) PLD was buffed at the same time that all tanks were nerfed, meaning that I do the same damage that I did before the patch (give or take) while the gap was closed, as the other tanks were brought closer together. What this does is give all the tanks their strengths and weaknesses, War is still OT heavy, and PLD and DRK are good for MT, but all classes are at least competitive. Remember how PLD was at the beginning of 3.0 and you can clearly see that the gap needed to be closed.

2) DPS balance. This reason is similar to why they added the limit break changes. It helps the developers massively when designing DPS checks if they can design them without having to take into account players choice to take a War and DRK or DRK and PLD, either way this excludes PLD because WAR is like a 5th DPS at that point (going against the point of the DPS check)

Like you said WAR is still the best, but it's no longer the only viable choice.

- From an early 3.0 PLD who could never find a group because the damage gap was too large

Edit: on a side note, you know a tanks damage needs to be nerfed when you can clear Thordan with 7 WAR, 1 healer

Edit 2: I do support the survey idea btw, it would help a lot, and I feel like the dev team would use the information, as they do seem to be trying to listen right now. The one problem I see though is that they try to please everyone and tend to make disjointed content trying to please both hardcore and casual, surveys might help, they might hinder

[ChrisBabaganoosh]

Another thinly-veiled "I'm salty that tank DPS was reduced" thread?

Who would have thunk it?

[HorseBoots]

You do know that if they didn't blanket nerf tank DPS you would have no reason to ever bring an actual DPS right? It's a design decision to keep the party dynamic balanced. The ratio of VIT to attack power is 1:1 with the ratio of STR to attack power. Classes like for example; Warrior was already able to put out numbers easily comparable to DPS.

So tell me, where would be the balance if those Warriors could still put out those numbers while now having 20k+ HP? With that much HP on top of mitigation you could easily just ignore mechanics and dangers flat out because you're pretty much invincible.

For one, the blanket nerf for Tank DPS was about 10%, not that bad. And two, when making the changes to VIT the blanket nerf had to be done, or else your party balance becomes broken. This isn't rocket science, you don't need a degree in game design to understand why such a change was made.