DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

[Ryel]

To me, this suggests that the game might be better off without the raiding tier since it is the raiding meta that is distorting the rest of he game. I'm not suggesting that raiding should, or will be dropped, but so many points in discussions come down to whether or not the proposed change will work for raiders. To me, that says that much of the core eleent of the game is predicated on raiding, and honestly, I think that's unhealthy for the game as a whole. We've been suffering this DPS meta for almost the entire life of FFXIV since ARR. It's time to go in another direction IMHO.

There's a fundamental lack of understanding of both human nature and game design 101 with comments like this.

Let me preface, I understand you think we should go in another direction when it comes to class balance due to the DPS meta but what you need to understand is that optimization will always be a thing and its a universal common in MMOs.

This is because MMOs use skinner box concepts of effort/time v reward which means efficacy, optimization and repeat success are often rewarded while outside of the box thinking (which can be fun) isn't universally adopted unless it proves to be more efficient in either ease to execute or time involved.

MMO job balance (especially in subscription based MMOs) will almost universally be based around wherever the highest level rewards are obtained due to them being the largest carrot in the game by which all other reward systems are compared to and balanced against.

So this is usually raids.

However lets put aside raids for a moment and assume they balanced jobs around say... dungeons.

Because dungeons are meant to be run more than once, players will then adopt the speed-running meta (even more-so than we already do now) because this is what class balance and reward systems would be determined by.

Faster dungeons = more dungeons completed = faster loot.

So...

The Tank able to deal with the largest pulls, hold threat and contribute damage would be the meta pick.
The DPS able to do the most AoE damage and deal with bosses would be meta pick.
The Healer able to heal the largest pulls and output the most damage would be meta pick.

This would always be the case no matter which way the devs push the numbers, because players will always gravitate towards the most successful combination.

What if they balanced around FATEs?

The jobs able to accrue the most participation values would then be the ones that shined the most. This means anything that uses DoTs (sup SMN) would instantly be tossed to the wayside as you would see massive influxes of healers and tanks spamming threat generation abilities in order to get max credit.

The list continues when applied to ANY content in the game. Players will always go with what works the best.

This doesn't even take into account that content like that isn't even difficult enough to actually see real balance against anyway, unless you're proposing they start creating savage dungeons on the level of raids in which case the meta will simply become whatever 4 job composition completes the instance easiest / fastest which makes it a moot point.

So back to raids

There are a couple of solutions to the problem.

A) Every role is able to do the exact same thing with different colored abilities AKA perfect homogenization.

This is boring because the razor thin differences in classes we already have would disappear entirely, this means DRK/PLD/WAR would have every ability do the exact same thing under every single circumstance, they would just be skinned differently.

Which incidentally is the avenue they seem to be pushing towards, they just haven't fully committed because they know people would get bored and likely unsub.

B) Aspects of the battle and encounter system would have to be redesigned from the ground up to allow more variance in the way we approach encounters.

This is massive can of worms because whatever change made will eventually be optimized on a per fight basis, its just how things always end up. Look at every single MMO in existence if you need reference on this. The woes of battle systems and class balance is something that plagues nearly every single multiplayer game because there are just massive numbers of variables in playstyles and approach that developers cannot account for.

This also works counter to the Duty Finder because a fight with too many possible encounter scenarios / strategies means the most popular / known one will likely be the one that is the easiest to execute and the jobs that favor that strategy will be preferred.

Which leads to the final issue

Players by far understand the game better than developers do.

It's funny because people always come up with the "let the devs do X because they know better" which almost universally Is not the case, developers may have a vision that they want things to fall in line with but it's almost impossible to brute force players to act in an specific manner and it still be considered fun.

Don't believe me?

Read Yoshida's comments on things like NIN/MCH/AST/WAR all when players were backing up how the jobs either performed way above or way below developer expectations because either players were just plain better than the developers at playing the game (See: NIN damage) or party composition / encounter level / tested gear did not match what the developers were planning (see jobs performing differently with gear/party variance).

It's not even a phenomenon unique to FFXIV, there are tons of game developers who have straight up admitted that classes/characters/jobs/specs/warframes/champions/heroes/etc have performed entirely different in live play than they initially planned.

It's why we have balance patches to begin with.

And why some games have public test servers.

So yeah you're looking at the symptom but not the actual problem.

Also I implore you to read this carefully should you chose to respond so we dont suffer another misunderstanding.